February 23rd

Pre-pandemic close, breathing birthday celebrating in 2020.

Yesterday was my birthday, but I entered roughly into the day with a sense of unnamable foreboding. Little sleep, and less joy (this ain’t me; I love to celebrate birthdays because they are such a joyous marker of life. Because I have ancestors who were denied the right even to know the day, month, and year of their birth, I am furiously dedicated to honoring ours).

The tenor of the day began to turn for me a couple of years ago. Sometime in March, I learned along with all of us that Amhaud Arbery was hunted down and murdered on February 23, 2020. The day was a Sunday. I remember gathering in loud raucous brunching after church with friends and family, some of whom flew in from the East Coast, during those last days of crowding and unabashed breathing before COVID. In March, when my country had briefly unified to flatten the curve, I meditated on the horror of Ahmaud’s death, the acquiescence of law enforcement, and the strange lynching-adjacent glee of his murderers, who were so turned on by snuffing out Black life that they proudly filmed it.

Power, prejudice, blood, murder titillates some as much as it horrifies others, and death-mongers seem to find God-sanctioned protection. Cain lives and finds sanctuary, generation after generation, and I am left wondering where exists a sanctuary from Cain? Abel’s blood cried out from the ground, but surely Abel cried out before he died. Why weren’t his living cries loud enough?