An Honest Piece

It's a peculiar thing, prejudice. Crafty and sly, it burrows in hidden crevices. It sinks beneath the skin like a virus, it is a sickness...contagious.

I'm still uneasy around people who aren't my race. It's far easier to assume their hatred, expect to be despised. And be, instead, pleasantly surprised. And I have been. Surprised. 

To look someone in the eye...and find there, common ground. A familiar patch of land. The same river we waded in when we were kids, the same lumpy castle made of sand. Someone who, but for a brief moment, when the sun meets its daily demise, understands. How the colours blur in the sky. You begin to trust them, grow a mutual fondness...like two olive branches reaching across an impossible distance. The gaps between your worlds begin to close. 

And then they say it.

The thing that makes your heart turn cold. Shrivels up the hand you held out for them to hold. Perhaps they didn't see it, when they picked up stones to strike the distant trees... that we shared the same leaves. Perhaps they didn't realize how wide my Blackness resides, how deep my roots go down. That I am many faces in a million places, breathing together as one. 

It was harmless, I know..that little joke. But it's how casually you brushed off your shoulders, the things that weigh on mine like boulders. And I wish I could tell you this, but the world already treats me like a trigger waiting to shoot, although it is I who carries the bullet wounds. Your careless words were to me like a blow.

Did you ever stop hating us? Or were you certain I'd never make a fuss.. You still see me as beast, except one you could domesticate. Its claws pulled, its teeth dulled.

You are right, in some ways I've been tamed. But when it comes down to it, I'll always feel a call to howl at the moon. Though I am lone wolf, I still recall the way back to my pack.

But loving you shouldn't mean leaving myself... And if prejudice is a wound then maybe we should nurse each other back to health.