Audio

My whole life wasn’t all bad. I wasn’t just walking through life getting called faggot and getting beat up and beat on all the time (though that shit did happen).

I’d be foolish to make it seem that way. But it damn sure ain’t been no crystal stair. There have been several triumphs so far, though only after crushing defeats and devastating loss. But I’ve never lost everything. And I never will. My first love was my first triumph. He was the first person that I knew loved me for exactly who I was at that time. 

I know a guy that loves me now. I hope he still knows me. I hope he’s reading this too. 

I remember telling my first love that if I would have go to hell for loving him I  would take my chances with hell because I knew that needed to feel this; and it was pure. 

I mean, it was mirky and brazen from the start, but the love was pure. 

I was surprised that he came back for my number.

I thought I looked crazy eye fucking him while he was on a date with a girl that looked like the joint from “In The House” with LL. 

I definitely knew it wasn’t her though. 

But he was eye fucking me back. 

And he was fine. 

He had twists in his hair before twists was hot for real. 

It was late June 1999 in Washington D.C. and I was 16. 

I stood in the phone booth acting like I was making a call while I waited for him to see her off.

Talk about creep shit. 

He was wit it though.

I mean, he came back for my number, right? 

We connected like 2 days later; or the next day; one of em.

I think he met me at Federal Center, or something like that, and then we went back to my house on the bus.  

I’m pretty sure it was the W-12. 

Good ole’ W-12 to Federal Center Southwest. 

I remember the moment I fell in love too. 

The exact fucking moment. 

He looked at me and into my eyes, deeply. 

No one had ever done that to me. 

No one had ever looked at me, into my eyes, to actually see me. 

He did. 

He cared about me and what happened to me, and I knew it that moment. 

He was only 16 too. 

But he knew what I needed in that moment, and he delivered. 

And I saw him too. 

I loved him because I knew he loved me. 

There’s something to be said about knowing unequivocally that somebody loves you back.

We loved each other, in the sun room underneath my grandmother’s bedroom, when we were sixteen in June.

And for a relationship that barely lasted two months, the love has lasted a lifetime. 

Y’all still got love letters from your first love? 

I do. 

Still. 

He meant it. 

I believed it. 

And I still do. 

The depth of his love forced me, for the first time, to challenge a belief system that had been instilled my whole life. 

If loving this boy was so bad, why did I finally feel seen, and loved, and wanted? 

No one had ever made me feel that way, certainly not God. 

How could I be his creation, but the nature of who I love, with the free will he supposedly gave me, espouses his condemnation and torment for eternity? 

Like that don’t even make any sense. 

I’m bout to burn in hell for ETERNITY for some shit I did on earth that ain’t hurt nobody for 90-100 years.

Nah God. 

That math don’t add up slim. 

Y’all earth is flat niggas are holding up progress.

We could be exploring other galaxies and shit; finding true peace and harmony and making life better for everyone.

But y’all still holding on to norms, rules, and religious text intended to civilize your imagination by enslaving your minds.

Our minds.

We cannot be the things that we don’t know to be.

We gotta stop asking for permission to be what we want to be, and start finding ways to just be what we want to be. 

My whole life, there have been people telling me that being who I am is wrong. 

Fuck them. 

No its not!