Pray.

I'm rocked to my core right now. I have a heavy heart and I need to express how I feel. These last couple  days I've been extra low energy so I didn't blog for fear that I don't give the best version of myself.  But this morning... I feel as though  I'll  never be the same person I  was yesterday morning and all the other mornings before. Today, I finally  gave myself permission to watch Fruitvale Station. This movie came out two years ago based on  the last hours of Oscar Grant. Oscar Grant was a black man whose life was brutality snatched away by San Francisco transit police on New Years Day,  2009. In 2009, I was sixteen. Young, and still very heavily grieving for Sean Bell,  another young black man who fell victim to power mad police. The loss of Sean Bell was in my city. New York. I had openly protested for  Sean only two years prior. He was blantantly slaughtered the year before that, just before Thanksgiving. Made me thankful for the air in my brother's  lungs that year. The wound this loss left behind was very deep. Watching the news and hearing about Oscar in 2009 made me miserable and afraid. Even more so because  Oscar Grant's murder at the hand of police was the first one, us kids could actually SEE. It was all over the Internet. And I refused to watch. Even after some of my equally disturbed friends told me how eerie and unmistakably evil it was. I was adamant  in my decision because I knew my sixteen year old heart was not ready for that type of pain. So of course, when Ryan Coogler's brilliant, chocolatey, directing self released the movie in 2013,  I didn't watch claiming that  at only 20, I still wasn't ready. Now two years later, less than ten days away from being the same age Oscar Grant was at his untimely demise, I allowed  myself  to be racked with grief as they pushed a bullet into his back. I let myself succumb to the inevitability of his last words. "He Shot Me, I Have A Daughter". I let myself be consumed by the tragedy. I let myself cry with reckless abandonment. It was in the middle of this despair that I realized I will NEVER be okay or "Ready" to see something so egregious,  not as long I'm part of humane minority. So feeling broken, I look up towards the ceiling,  and speak for the peace, not only in my soul, but for this world.