When I was small, I made my dad read The Wolf’s Chicken Stew 1,000 times. I wanted to capture the pure joy of discovering something new again. I could barely read, but I had it memorized. The repetition seared the book into my brain. The adults in my family were always reading. I read my two brothers’ summer reading books and gave them the gist while they wrote their book reports before the school year started. My grandpa loved John Grisham, and I loved telling him when I finished another. My grandma bought me sets of classics: Jane Austen, Edgar Allen Poe, the Brontës. The notices, ads, and prayers in the church bulletin. Any magazine from cover to cover. Our neighbor packed up her adult daughter’s Nancy Drews, and I walked down the street to collect them with our wagon. I couldn’t get enough. I built worlds full of people who do not know me.
The reading and writing and rewriting distracted me from the monsters in my closet, the knocking under my bed. It was my brothers. Every few nights, Chris and Brian snuck in while I brushed my teeth and washed my face and they waited. After I chased them out, shrieking, my parents would yell for us to go to bed. Afterward, in my mind, the monsters remained. So, I rewrote them. It’s the wind outside, the house settling, a tree branch against the window. I redesigned my surroundings and pulled out a book every night until I fell asleep. I started hiding under the covers with a nightlight so no one would know I was still awake, but then it became a habit. I liked my little cocoon underneath my sheets.

Catholicism requires memorization. The books are there, but it’s implied you need to hold the text in your mind. It helps the guilt stick. I taped my nighttime prayer to my closet, so I’d remember to say it before I went to bed. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” I didn’t love it, so I rewrote that too. I added Mary into every prayer she wasn’t in. I made faces in church. I was annoying in Sunday School. If there was no room for Mary, then where was there room for me?

I miss the joy of the Scholastic Book Fair. My mom worked at the bank and helped me with my first budget, so I could spend my babysitting money on glittery pens and oblong erasers that didn’t really erase, just left rubbery, multicolored lint everywhere. I pored over the catalogue and the pixelated images, looking for Black girls like me. I like origin stories. I like seeing how people become. I was uncertain then if I would be anything. For a while, I couldn’t see more than one day ahead of me. As I got older, my differences from everyone else in town became obvious; the occasional teasing and rude remark turned into relentless bullying. Everyone said: “Don’t take it personally, it’s not that serious, why are you making such a big deal?” Then: “You’re so quiet, you’re so distracted, you never speak up.” Later: “Why can’t you get along with anyone, why aren’t you smaller, brighter, nicer, sweeter, better, other, more.”

In middle school, I took extra time on a weekly journal entry for English class because I was enjoying myself. It was my last piece of homework, and my brain sparked with an idea. I wanted to spread out and do it properly. I poked around my parents’ desk and found a pad of long legal paper and got settled at the dining room table. I drummed my pencil on the page for a minute, and then I let it all come straight from my mind and onto the paper. I giggled at myself. I edited. I rewrote it in my journal and eagerly awaited my teacher’s approval. When I got my journal back, I saw a neatly written note in the corner: “You didn’t write this, did you? 5/10.”
I thought my teacher meant it was so bad that she couldn’t believe I wrote it. I showed it to a friend at lunchtime, confused. “She thinks you cheated,” she said immediately. I felt a rush of shame. The torment usually came from the other kids, and my 12-year-old brain dismissed them all as children, beneath me, as I shuffled, head down, from one class to another. I was already taller than most of my classmates and teachers, so I had to be cautious about who I talked to and how. I never told my teacher she was wrong about me. I had no proof. I filed it away with the other insults and never mentioned it to anyone else. They wouldn’t believe me either. I zipped through the next journal entry, finishing it before I even left school. It didn’t matter. The next week, no note, only “9.5/10.” An A for no effort. I spent the rest of the year balancing between doing well and doing too well, just enough so no one would suspect me of anything.

In college, when I was failing organic chemistry, I went to my professor’s office hours. To be fair, nearly all of us were failing, but I did well in my other classes. This felt like learning long division for the first time. While I waited for my professor to finish talking to some other student, I took Treasure Island off his shelf. I had brought in a carrot cake for a classmate’s birthday and sat the cake pan at my feet. As another student walked off, my professor eyed me suspiciously and called me into his office.
“You’re not going to fail,” he said, in between bites of another slice of carrot cake. “But what are you doing here? You’re the only student to ever read a book off that shelf. Ever.” I talked to him about my English classes I took on the sly, how I was on the path to be a pharmacist. He shook his head. “You’re going to get through this class fine. But you have two options: You have to change your major, or you have to drop out and open a bakery because this is the best fucking cake I’ve ever had.”

After I changed my major, I took a bunch of courses that opened up language for me. A troupe came to perform for one of my Shakespeare classes, to physically breathe life into what we studied. A curvy Black woman with a crown of coily hair performed Lady Macbeth and stunned us with her full humanity. The rage and disappointment and love and dependence—that we understood and analyzed off the page—but she showed us Lady Macbeth’s sexuality, a need and desire. She showed us that she was more than just a vessel for creating some other possible tiny human, more than just a way to help a man learn to build up his own pride.

Act 1, Scene 7: “…to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man.”

She cooed at her scene partner, flustered him, drew him close to her, caressed his face. They were either excellent actors or were going to have sex immediately after leaving our class. Or both. Look at what words can do, I thought.
At my parents’ home for a few days, I prayed for an epiphany. Everything I did felt wrong, my brain felt fuzzy, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. After I changed my major, my parents drove to campus and scolded me, told me I was ruining my life. Called me childish, selfish, spoiled for wanting to do something different, for thinking I was worthy of choosing another path. I realized then, not for the first time: I was only meant to be living a life as an extension of theirs. They had chastened me, but that only let me see them clearer. They were cold around me, moving with an air of superiority that bullies have when they think they’ve won. I wondered, not for the first time, why I was back at the house at all. I hadn’t changed my mind. I went to the store next to the café looking for a CD, or a necklace, a distraction. The shelves were always packed with a bit of everything. I spotted a CD that looked interesting, but it was stuck on something on the shelf. I tugged at it, the shelf wobbled a bit, and a book from the top fell and hit me on the head. Subtle. Luckily, it was a paperback, Stephen King’s On Writing. It felt too easy, but it was exactly what I’d asked for. I didn’t have to tell anyone what I was doing, I could just do it. I didn’t have to report in or explain or apologize. That certainty helped me pack my stuff and drive back to campus, willing to take the chance to live my own life and mess it up rather than live someone else’s and always wonder why. I won a writing award, and the glow of possibility from that little check made me feel I was right.

I took a poetry course because I didn’t know much about it; I had danced around it for years. Poetry made me nervous. I didn’t think I was enough to do it justice. Now, I think I might be able to try. My teacher was a Black woman with short hair and an impeccable sense of style. She always looked put together and comfortable. She was grounded and ethereal and driven and sweet and forceful and lovely and all the things people think sit at odds with each other, the things I want to be. I strive to bring forth that energy in myself. Toward the end of the class, the teacher announced that she brought in stones for us, and we would each get to choose one. She spoke about keeping it for ourselves, keeping it safe, and about using its energy. In my mind, I heard, take the blue one. Odd. I didn’t even know if there was a blue one. She kept them cupped in her hands. I pictured them as grayish water stones. But when she got to me, there was a stunning, smooth blue stone. I was shocked no one else had taken it. I gingerly selected it out of her open palms as if it would vanish before I reached it. I keep it in a tiny mesh bag with my rosary. When I take the stone out of the bag and hold it, it feels like praying.