Black, Tired and Ready To Die

Nearly since birth, I have been subjected to human cruelty, this is part and parcel of being born into an unstable marriage to two emotionally unstable people. Only one parent was empathetic and caring, the other was cruel, destructive, violent.

Mother divorces father, family is plunged into grinding, relentless poverty. I’ve struggle all of my life to escape this trap. I have gone to school and amassed mounds of higher education debt. I have kept my legs closed and just worked and studied, like a mule, only to hit the reality of financial limits, racial limits. Human limits. People are not kind. People are cold. Cruel. Self-absorbed.

I also have the pleasure of being black in a culture that seems to resent and hate people of color, unless of course we are dribbling a ball, scrubbing a floor, or acting like minstrel buffoons. Tacitly mind you, because if a POC brings up our reality we are dismissed as a whiner. After all, the country just had a half black POTUS with a Muslim name. Every day of my life I have awakened in a country where the whole middle swath of states, and states along the southern border hate me for being alive, can you imagine? Where other people can say “I think I’ll move here”, “I think I’ll go to school there”, every move I have thought about making has by necessity, been prefaced by a search for hate crime statistics and number of white citizens vs black in a given area to avoid a potential “incident” or years of harassment and tension.

Every day of my life I have been fed message that I am destined to be on welfare, that I expect handouts, that I am intellectually inferior, sexually promiscuous and inordinately predisposed to being violent, ugly and over all, undesirable. I took pride in being the opposite of these things, but in the end it actually meant nothing, who gives a fuck? Just another pile of carbon and flesh fighting to believe in its own significance against a tide that says my sense of self-worth is merely an illusion.

I have literally fought my entire life to preserve my dignity, to find some semblance of safety and security. After an unrelenting series of bad incidences over the past two years, after 4 decades of being strong, resilient, persistent, I am bled out. I am dead, and now I am at a loss for what to do with the body. I know I should not be here anymore, under other circumstances, someone in my position should be able to take a long vacation, go engage in life affirming activities, take a load off and escape reality for a while, but if you are a POC, only rarely can you do this, and usually it involves having the financial security to be able to afford to do it. Even if I had the means to travel, the first order of business would be to research which regions or countries are racial friendly to black people. There is no escaping.

My suicide secret is that I really don’t want to die, but I can’t see any other way out of the trap. My youth is waning, my energy has dwindled, what meager financial nest egg I was able to accumulate was loss in my attempt to start a business and my hope has died, years ago.

Simply at a loss until I get up the nerve to destroy my head with a hollow point bullet. I’m dragging through life in a daze now. This is not dignified living and it needs to be put to an end.