Covid-19 Fitness Check-in:
A Long Walk.

To combat the sense of isolation created by shelter-in-place, I like to walk.

Just like my Dad, I begin each day with exercise, meditation, & prayer. I listen to podcasts and catch up on news, and then I type "plants" into google maps.

Weather permitting, I take a long walk to a plant store somewhere in Brooklyn, and if a plant talks to me, I bring it home.

Doing this is taking my life into my hands.

There is no activity I can engage in that doesn't put my life in jeopardy, in a country where the only value placed on Black life is in subservience.

I am ill-suited for subjugation.

Today while walking a friend asked how I felt. My instinctual response was: "rageful."

It's not lost on me that this isn't recognized as a word. Joyful is a word because joy is permissible.

Being Black in this country means always having to sublimate your anger.

Today in preparation for my plant walk, I put on my mask & wireless headphones, and cued up "Caste.”

I criss-crossed Brooklyn, visiting plant store after store, Isabel Wilkerson in my ear, singing my life with her words, biting my tongue hard enough to draw blood, carrying 1/10,000th of one ounce of melanin in my skin as if it were a sherman tank.

I hoped it would take the edge off the anger (it did not) and wondered if something like "walking while angry" would be reason enough for someone to kill me, or someone like me, today.

Ten thousand steps were not enough.

I walked until my feet bled and blistered, because that is a pain most people can understand.

Despite persistent belief in the medical community that Black people either do not feel pain or experience it in a lesser degree, physical pain conjures a high degree of relatability.

I have reluctantly come to the awful conclusion that no amount eloquence or succinctness with words will ever be enough to make those who wish harm upon me, or those who are passive in the face of those who wish me harm, empathetic.

I can't out-walk, out-run, out-talk the hate.

I can only outlast it.

To combat the isolation created by systemic racism, I talk to my people. They're easy to identify, in that we don't have to explain ourselves to each other. We use a dialect rarely spoken out loud, because our solidarity is shared.

Our lives and continued existence is bound to each other.

If you want to begin to understand our language, start here.

Maybe then we can walk together. https://www.amazon.com/Caste-Origins-Discontents-Isabel-Wilkerson/dp/0593230256/ref=sr_1_2