Black Boy Out of Time

by Hari Ziyad

I used to resent the fly who has the whole world to buzz around but stays circling my head anyway. I learned only recently that insects orbit our bodies because they are attracted to our decaying skin. They sense the parts of us that are dying, that we would never otherwise notice. Perhaps, in the single month they have to live, they are just trying to share in this terrifying experience together—just saying, “I am dying, too”—but all I ever heard was a nuisance.

as if to be mentally ill in a society that fuels mental illness is reason enough for the state to punish a person.

This society has conditioned me to believe that healing is just the muting of one’s rage.

we are all just souls trapped in differently colored bodies,

What’s the point of believing in anything if you don’t have doubts sometimes? What would you have confronted and overcome to make having faith worth it?

Sometimes I want life to be easy, but resistance never is.

When I name the violence that happens to me, the carceral state tries to force me to punish and blame someone for it. If I refuse to punish and blame, it pressures me to give up naming my trauma. Healing from an assault when my harm-doer, emboldened by a culture swimming in rape, is not evil nonetheless requires a complete rejection of the carceral thinking that conditions me, and a refusal to strictly adhere to its language when that’s the language I’ve been given.

Abolition posits that redress is possible when we are allowed to hold resentment and kindness simultaneously, without these sentiments being forced into binary opposition. It posits that people who do bad things can do better, in this life or the next, if acknowledged as being part of a community to which they are accountable, a community that cares for and supports them without letting them off the hook.