Drafts For An Unwritten Letter

   I was 12 years old when I watched my twin die on the news, and I spent the next 10 or 12 or however many months writing, and then scratching out, his name in a bent-up composition notebook. Tamir Rice, blank; Tamir, no; Tamir, wait; Let me start again. I tried to let a spirit write through me, and the spirit never came. I tried to prop him up on the promontory of the page, but nothing dripped down; I sat him alongside the margins and waited for him to speak, but, still, there was nothing. In those 11 or 14 or however many months, I couldn’t write him, I couldn’t think him, I couldn’t see him, and I started to sense I didn’t exist to him – that we were impossible to each other.

   I spent those 8 or 13 or however many months drafting up a list of things to tell him about:  those two weeks over winter break during which I refused to leave my house, the recurring nightmare of being trapped in a black box with a toy gun, the talks I have with mom that end in us mourning another version of myself who already took the wrong shortcut down Connecticut avenue and, thus, was already dead. But his name just sat there on the page – one long, drawn out taunt.

   None of it could be written. I couldn’t face him – which meant, really, that I couldn’t face myself, which meant, really, that I couldn’t look directly ahead at what his death meant. A sharp, repeating fear got in the way of everything; it infiltrated my imagination, shattered my fantasies, penetrated my sense of a world that I knew was hostile towards me, but just how hostile?

   I was sideways maybe, but not obtuse. I knew about the world – and what it wanted to do with me. But I’d managed, somehow, to grow accustomed to the constant devastations, the constant crises of faith. I invented new words for whatever it was that was out to get me: it was not ‘violence,’ but something different; it was not ‘premature death,’ but something different; it was not ‘charged,’ but accidental. I believed Wittgenstein when he said that the limits of my language  could be the limits of my world.

     But watching my twin die on the news that day threw it all into crisis. I could no longer count on one hand the numbers of times I’d been called a nigger and call that good enough. I could no longer forgive those older white women for constantly confusing me for someone else. I could no longer trace the outlines of abstract, pushed-down memories of scooting up against white kids in my classes that wanted nothing to do with me. I could no longer ignore the jokes, the comments about my skin, the slimy fingers in my hair, the quizzical expressions, the bumped elbows and shoulders, the intense feeling of alienation all of those small, horrible things seemed to incur inside of my growing body. In those 6 or 7 or 20 months after Tamir died, everything was all clear – too clear – and not enough to stop the ringing in my ears. I dreamed for days after of that toy gun shattering against a mirror suspended halfway in the air. When the mirror broke, the glass flew just pass my skin.

–

    Before I go on any further, I must admit this much: I have never been keen on letting things die. In those earlier years of my life, when things didn’t need to make sense, I tried all that I could to increase the distance between me and death. If I stumbled across a dead flower, I would pick it up and take it home with me, convinced  I could nurse it back to life.

    I didn’t let pets die either. I once owned a pair of frogs, whom I adored until one ate the other. In spite, I refused to feed my once-loved frog, until he too died. But I denied this, the fact of his death. Days, weeks, a month after he croaked, and still he remained, lifeless & suspended in the water tank on my nightstand. The waltz continued.

–

  When my twin died, there was a part of me that refused it. It was not disbelief, but maybe, disagreement. Tamir, I tried talking to him, but no one called back. Tamir, I took to geography and drew a circle on a map where he died, but no one appeared. Tamir, I wrote on a small piece of paper and placed inside of my mailbox, but no one came to pick it up. He was gone, which I could fathom, but couldn’t agree with. I continued, writing and unwriting his name until my fingers numbed.

–

    At some point, the writing let up. What my twin didn’t know when he died was that he left an entire world out there for me. The first time I left my house after his death, I took a long walk from one side of the city to the other. I counted in my head the number of playgrounds I passed, and I imagined all of the times my twin and I spent playing in each of them; those sticky weeks in the summer we spent pushing feet our feet in and out of the gravel on the swing sets; the football passed around that I couldn’t catch; the sissy and fag that came after the missed ball that I seemed, also, to always fumble; all of those times we played through the sunset and had to run from the playground to someone’s doorstep. It was summer somewhere, and both of us were still alive, and feeling the weight of our bodies pounding against the hot pavement. In every playground I passed, there was our boyhood, I thought, before all of that was taken.

–

   By then, I’d also thrown away every hoodie I owned; I gave up on fantasy novels and settled for Melville, Woolf, Sophocles, and Ellison; I replaced my blue sheets for fresh, white ones; I began scrutinizing my reflection; I began combing my hair until my curls straightened into lines across my scalp; I covered my walls with posters to hide their childish burgundy color; I gave up on throwing the football around; I stole a razor from a drawer in my mom’s bathroom and pressed it softly against my dry skin; I mowed the lawn, for hours on end, until the grass was small, smooth, and impenetrable.

   When Tamir died, I caught onto something that was already tugging at me: I was no longer a boy. I was certainly not a man, but I was something else completely and entirely. And if I was something else, completely and entirely, I would not die as a boy, like Tamir, or any of our other brothers. If I must die, I thought, let it not be like hogs. If I must die, I recited, pulling my tie up to my neck, o let me nobly die…pressed to the wall, but fighting back.

   I did not want my boyhood to be a death sentence, in the way that his boyhood was a death sentence. I wanted something other than his death, which was my death, which was our death, which was the death of all the other black boys to whom we entered into twinship with. I wanted my life to be something that my ghostly half could be proud of – because he never had to work for it, because he never had to suffer through all that grief to get there, because he could just be a giant phantom body of need and want and forestalled boyhood, and his innocence could be enough for the both of us.

  –

   Nothing changed, I realized, in those however many months after my twin died. The leaves still rotted; the snow still cropped up on driveway; the boys still called me sissy and fag at school; I still fumbled those words around in my hands and in my mouth; I still slouched through Monday Mass; the rain still soaked up my favorite sneakers. Nothing changed except, maybe, that nothing felt safe anymore, in the way that nothing was ever safe.

   Some months after he died – when I could no longer write him, and I could no longer feel his presence, my twin, trailing on the corners of my shadow – I began taking longer walks through the city. I learned how slowly –  or how quickly – to walk behind a white woman on a sidewalk; I learned when to cross the street, which streets to cross, and how to cross them to ease her temperament; I learned how to slouch my backpack appropriately to give the effect of its weightlessness; I learned which corners the cops stood at, and which ones they did not.

   I still passed the playgrounds, and I still thought of him, and our twelve years together spent hurdling ourselves into mud and sand and water and whatever we could take that would bring us closer to the earth and to ourselves. Each time I passed a playground I thought to myself that, buried somewhere in the mass of dirt and band-aids, were all of those words that could complete the sentence that began with Tamir.