“who are you to me,
like you know me
like you think I’m going to tell you
the truth
like you think I’m going to give you that.”
-Eurydice, "Polaroid Stories"
I don’t know you, but if I tell this tale, it might as well be the truth. At least to the point where you can understand me—and you. For this is your story, too. The story of how each of us will be faced with our own death. And if we will be able to say yes to it.
I guess it was a little easier for me, having had a near-death experience only months before. My consciousness flashing from known reality into a black void where only the I am that I am could be sensed. Then being enveloped by a golden white light that I can only describe as pure love or home. In some ways, faith gave me the courage to walk this road, but faith can only take you so far. There will be a point when the road is so dark that even one’s faith will be snuffed out. All that’s left is self. Not the egoic self, but the self that existed before all of the false idols we erect in a lifetime. A self that leads the way when you think you have nowhere else to turn. Over time, I have learned to call this self, Lawrence. For years, I wasn’t a hundred percent sure he truly existed, but life events have taught me that I am not alone. So before we go further into our tale of love, death, and possible rebirth, let me introduce you to him.
Thinking back, I’m not even sure if my earliest memory of him is a true memory. I recall being a toddler, maybe. In the back seat of a car. The roads were icy and everything outside was white and blue. It was night and my father was struggling to control the car as we slid down a steep road with other vehicles in the same predicament. I remember an inner calm within the fear as we glided through the chaos and made our way to the bottom of the hill safely. That calm within the chaos is Lawrence to me. And the only way I can come home to him is by going within. But, as is the case for most of us, I often forget. The physical world easily hypnotizes me through spectacle and strong emotions, taking me on the ride of my life. Doing as many loop-the-loops and crazy turns as my spirit will allow.
I was unaware of Lawrence for much of my life, but questioned his possible existence. As a child, I would often spend weekday afternoons locked in the bathroom, balanced on our small vanity, staring into the mirror. I watched the image before me very closely to see if it would move. It never did, but that didn’t stop me from coming back the following day and trying again. I don’t know how this idea got into my head, but for some reason I thought someone else might be looking back.
It wasn’t until middle school that I had my first real physical experience of Lawrence. While waiting for the school bus one morning, my friends and I decided to pass the time by hopping over a nearby creek. It wasn’t that big of a jump, but still a challenge. On either side of it was sloping concrete, allowing the creek to flow undisturbed beneath the adjacent road. We each took a turn jumping from one side to the other. When my turn came, I leaped and landed on the other side well enough, but I didn’t take into account the slope of the concrete. As my legs straightened after absorbing the impact of landing, gravity took hold and began to pull me toward the water below. My instinct was to flail my arms and reach out for anything or anyone to stop the inevitable. As I tried to do so, my body froze. I was locked inside of a still body as it splashed into the creek. As soon as my body hit the water and mud, control of motion returned. My head turned and noticed a huge rock an inch from my face. If I had flailed my arms like I wanted, I might have hit it. As my friends helped me up, one stated that it looked like I wanted the fall into the creek. “No,” I told him. But how could I explain what I felt?
The idea of something or someone being with me vanished as soon as I got home and had to explain why I missed the bus. The next time I remember Lawrence resurfacing was the following year when I auditioned for a theater program at a distant high school. All of my preparation for that audition was honestly less than inspiring. Something expected from the average teenager who didn’t belong in a theater program. Yet, when I stepped in front of the professors who ran the program, something magical occurred. I became an actor, speaking and moving with ease. As if someone else had taken over my body for the second time. I was accepted into the program.
While in high school, I grew more awkward and self-conscious. Aware of everything that was wrong with me. Classmates could smell my insecurities and had no problem expressing their dislike of me. “He irks me,” stated one popular girl just before our math class started. I sat there, pretending that I didn’t hear her comment. Always pretending to be unaware of the hateful looks, words, and acts directed towards me. I recently shared with a counselor, “The only psychological issue I have is that I can go to sleep and wake up as if nothing has happened. Ready to move forward and create a brighter future. The only issue is, everyone else is stuck on yesterday.”
The other issue is that when I would wake up, I often forgot Lawrence’s presence as well. I don’t remember an obvious encounter with him again until the night I was disfellowshipped by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Feeling that pure calm wash over me during the trial by elders and the song, “Smile,” playing in my head as I broke down crying in the car. Always the welcomed uninvited guest. Yet, even then, I didn’t understand.
When I made it to the University of Maryland, College Park, is when Lawrence started to truly step in. Being disfellowshipped felt like a sort of initiation into my real life. A life in which I had no idea how to approach. Thankfully, Lawrence did know and life began to present to me opportunities in alignment with my inner desires. Almost as if someone was deciding my curriculum, knowing the skills that needed to be honed for a later date. For example, my parents graciously offered to pay for 4 years of an in-state program as long as my degree wasn’t in theater. It took some time, but I eventually settled on English Literature. However, during my sophomore year, I decided to take a theater history class as an elective. Near the end of that semester, the teacher informed us that auditions for the fall plays were approaching and that we should consider auditioning. Just for fun. One of the plays was "Polaroid Stories," a retelling of Ovid’s "Metamorphoses" but through the stories of street kids. I decided to read a copy of the play at the performing arts library and fell in love with the character, Narcissus. He was a young street hustler with a wild spirit and broken heart. Someone begging to truly be seen. Not just for his outer beauty, but his soul. I decided to audition.
Looking back, I’m grateful that I never thought about the odds being stacked against me as a non-theater major. I just wanted it. I remember waiting in the hall of the new Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and watching unknown theater majors do their theater thing. Even though I had been a theater major my first couple of years of high school, I never learned how to be that excited about everything and nothing. My name was called and I walked in and met Adele, the director and one of the theater professors. I stood in the middle of the room and performed a monologue directly from the play. With my limited training, it never occurred to me that I should have prepared something not from the play itself. Adele watched from her metal chair behind a fold-up table. When I finished she allowed for a pause and then began to direct. Asking me to do it again but with a slight adjustment. I did.
I don’t remember if there was a round of callbacks for the play. I only remember walking into the theater department on the day the final casting was to be posted. I can recall going to the corkboard with my heart racing, allowing my eyes to adjust and take in the lucky few. Next to the name of Narcissus was mine. I got the part. I didn’t scream or dance or run around being congratulated by classmates and friends. It was a very quiet moment. The only one who knew what was happening was probably Lawrence. Always Lawrence.
That summer was busy with me stepping further away from my old persona molded by “no” and religious rules into one more open and expansive. One day while working in the same restaurant I had been with since 16, an old classmate from my performing arts high school showed up and told me she was a journalist for a small weekly newspaper. I was jealous. Since reading “Little Women,” being a writer like Jo March had become one of my many dreams. My friend suggested that I apply to be an intern over the summer and I did. I ended up working two jobs that summer, with the reporter position being unpaid. I drove from Oxon Hill to Clinton and then to Rockville, Maryland daily, Not to mention the locations of where I had to do interviews, which could take me into D.C. or Virginia. I will be forever grateful to my grandmother and her truck for allowing me this opportunity. My grandfather passed away within a year of my leaving home. That meant she had one too many vehicles in her garage. I just needed the courage and right wording to ask to have one. When I did, she didn’t hesitate to sell me her truck for one dollar. Her generosity gave me the ability to get back to work and to now fulfill a dream.
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Within the past few years, as my world was quickly crumbling in every category, an aunt called to inform me that someone contacted my grandmother pretending to be the police. Apparently, I had been in a car accident in North Carolina while attending a wedding. The officer put me on the phone, but my voice was muffled due to a broken nose. Since I had never been arrested, they were going light on me and set bail at $5,000 cash. My grandmother withdrew the cash and sent it via FedEx to Paterson, NJ. While in transit, she informed the rest of the family and they thankfully were able to stop the package. “We WILL find out who did this,” my aunt said in an accusatory tone. I didn’t have the strength to defend myself with everything else going on. My thought was, if that’s what you think of me after all this time, then I have nothing else to say to you. But as I got hit with one injustice after the next, it felt like everyone was thinking the same thing. That I was a criminal. A thief. A pervert to hide your husband and kids from. A… I don’t even know what. To work with people for 7 years and have them turn on you can make anyone go insane. How? Why? No, I’m no saint, but I never wanted to be. How boring! But I’m not the devil. Although that title has been shouted at me some nights while walking or even when showing up for my shift at the hospital. I would always brush it off, knowing that I gave my all to my patients. Lately, the role of deviant felt like a consensus. And in many ways, I started to become what everyone was thinking. There was no one to reflect back my good qualities except my patients. Who could I trust after watching others smile and say good morning and then scream in panic on the phone with their mother because I was walking behind them in the park? To fight off the heaviness, I shut more and more people out and traveled further within. My need for human connection breaking through as chaotic sexual behavior to numb the pain. Only to get burned by uncaring horny gay men even more, creating a horrible cycle I could not break free from. I could not trust man’s ability to love yet I could not stop looking for someone to take away the pain. When silence and stillness did come through leaving work for a month at a time, I would go further inwards to Lawrence, my only refuge in a storm I was not prepared for.
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Working and driving constantly during the summer of my unpaid internship would also take a toll on me. There were nights I was so tired that I had to roll down the windows and blast the radio to stay awake. There were two nights where even that didn’t work. On both nights, I recall driving normally and then—pause. A pause in consciousness. I opened my eyes and realized that I was no longer in the lane I remembered being in. Panicked, I turned the steering wheel hard to move back into the correct lane, failing to even look around me to see if there was a car nearby. My life was not easy, but it was mine. And I didn’t want to lose it. Not yet.
As for my love life at that time, I didn’t have one. I was too strange for anyone to like. Having grown up Jehovah’s Witness, dealing with the trauma of my childhood, being black but not urban, I just didn’t check enough boxes to be anyone’s love interest. Young people were really just starting to feel comfortable with being out. I remember liking, Tom, a short Irish guy who was living on his own in Virginia. He was straight but liked hanging out with me. I don’t even know how we met, but I do remember the last time I ever hung out with him.
Tom had invited me to go to a rave with him in DC. The plan was to drive to his place in Virginia and then take his car into the city. Once inside the club, I quickly lost him. We hadn’t even bought a single drink and the man was gone. I decided to hang out near one of the bars that had heavy foot traffic in the hope of seeing him pass by. About 30 minutes later, there’s Tom stumbling towards me. “How did you get drunk so fast?” I asked him. Not even considering he may have consumed something other than alcohol. We exchanged a few words and he was gone again. This was not fun. I knew I should leave, but how? I didn’t have my truck, I didn’t have a mobile phone to call anyone, and I didn’t have enough money to take a cab. I was stuck. What do I do? “Go outside,” I heard in my head. What? No way, I thought. I’m safer inside than out. What will I do outside? “Go outside,” the inner voice said again. Fine, I thought. But I don’t know what I’m going to do.
With deep reservation, I stepped out into the balmy DC night and allowed the club doors to close behind me. The second they did a white van abruptly pulled up and stopped in front of me. The side door slid open with a bang and a woman asked, “Need a ride?” This is our last round for the night.” I looked at the text on the side of the van. It was a church van and that church was in Oxon Hill, MD. It was where I lived! “Yes. I do.” I jumped in the back and they took me home, allowing me to keep all of my vital organs. Thank you, God! In reality, I think it may have been Lawrence doing his handy work. Always to the rescue if I decide to actually listen.
Figuring out what to do with my life has always been a major concern. There are a variety of opportunities that come our way, but which one is right? A part of me just wanted to run away from everything I knew and hit reset. Start from scratch and disappear into the world. While searching the web one day, dreaming of this type of life, I found an advertisement for AmeriCorps. Looking over the various opportunities they offered, I decided to apply for a counseling position in Chicago working with adults and youth around HIV/AIDS. I remember the interviewers asking over the phone about my studies and what I was reading on my own. They were impressed that I was reading "The Brothers Karamazov." I still haven’t finished that book, but a newer edition sits on the shelf next to my bed today, waiting to be read.
AmeriCorps not only accepted me into their program, they were kind enough to tweak the responsibilities of the position to accommodate my ultimate career goal. That is, working directly with young LGBTQ youth like myself. Helping them to navigate the process of individuation and cope with feelings of lovelessness or otherness. To be honest, I still struggle with these issues today. At the same time AmeriCorps accepted me, the editor at the paper said he was willing to take me on part-time if I would reconsider Chicago. And then there was Narcissus. This last opportunity probably scared me the most. To dare to be seen on stage after all these years. A stage much bigger than the one at my old high school. I would be judged. My talent or lack thereof under scrutiny. Was I worthy of the role? Was it a mistake I would later regret? Fear took over as I sat down to email Adele, explaining why I could not play the part. A dream I had so badly wanted to make a reality was now gone, and it was my doing.
For so many, the experiences they most covet exist only within their dreams. I have often had vivid dreams. Some of which I have shared here. But I never knew what to make of them. There were nights when the sound of my name would cause me to wake as I struggled to respond to the caller, only to find myself alone in darkness. One dream event I will never forget occurred when I fell asleep one night on the living room floor next to a man I had just met. In the morning, I went upstairs, used the bathroom, and came back down. When I entered the living room, the man asked what was wrong, recounting how I had jumped up in a panic and ran up the stairs. Only then did I recall what I had forgotten. When I reached the top of the stairs, I pushed open the doors to the three bedrooms and saw a child sleeping peacefully in each bed. Safe. Relieved, I then went to the bathroom and allowed their images to slip from consciousness.
A dream somewhat on that level occurred right after I turned down the role of Narcissus. I was disappointed in myself and concluded that the damage had been done. It was best to move on and allow the opportunity to fade from my consciousness, much like the 3 sleeping children did. But then came a dream that expanded my idea of what is possible.
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