if you give a writer a camera
dyke life, nyc, march - june 2025
november 2024 - a year since my [friendship] breakup, time to try again, i find myself outside juke bar in bushwick reminding myself that i can always leave if i don’t hit it off with any of the other dykes. i leave hours later having had incredible conversations with other black lesbians, exchanged contact information, and made plans to see each other at future meetings. i take selfies in the bathroom to remember the moment before i leave.
december 2024 - i miss this month’s meeting busy being thrown out of my parent’s home thousands of miles away on christmas eve. an ill-advised series of depressed decisions finds me walking through an area without ride share or public transit, alongside a highway and across state lines, convinced a cop will stop me walking where there is no sidewalk with a purse full of shooters and dig far enough to find the 3.5. i make it out of the dead zone and call an uber back to my $80/night home for christmas. i spend the day somewhere sober is far behind, laughing at the idea that it’s sooo much easier to be gay in 2025. wondering how much longer i’ll choose to deal with it all.
january 2025 - i haven’t really spoken to my family—my parents who kicked me out and brothers who didn’t check in—since i came back to brooklyn the day after christmas. a day that has always stressed me immensely, my mother’s birthday. i celebrate the new year at a party, only the second time in my life that i spent it somewhere besides a church. the stress of the choice not to reconcile on her special day haunts me for weeks, so much so that i barely celebrated that new year, until the knowledge that the next black lesbian bar meet-up will be a memorial for one of the beautiful people i got to have just one conversation with pulls me from my wallowing and reminds me of the stakes.
so, i go out.
