Be Shakti

by. Be Shakti

Dear Woodsy Baby,

I know you wish you had left a letter and tucked it into Chris’s pocket. I know you wish equally that you hadn’t touched his leg side. You felt the hard, crunchy cotton wool stuffing jammed inside his body cavity and it reminded you of the cheap carnival stuffed animals you just had to win, but ultimately ended up discarding anyway.

You are learning the hardest lesson early, young. Maybe too young. You lost your brother.

And you will lose everything you love.

Let this sweet, young corpse cut open your chest cavity.

Stay soft. Your heart breaks to open.

Love, always and forever,

Woodsy Baby/Bug/Bethany/Be/Wild Heart

by Chante Owens

This Skin

I can smell the burning hair from here and it’s been 15 years. I know where to find you—the source of that scorched scent— filling the bathroom with smoke and the sink with broken, tattered hairs. I can see you there, in the hazy reflection of the mirror, your skin ripe with acne, and your brow furrowed as you steady the jaws of two 450-degree ceramic plates.

You’re just a teenager. You think this whole business of flat ironing your hair is about looking pretty. Your thoughts are spent on boys and popularity, and not yet on racial identity, or the way you’ve been socialized, or how curious it is that all your friends and crushes are white. You think having brown skin is a real inconvenience.

In 12 years, you’ll be able to say “back then,” and things will be much clearer. Things that seem harmless to you now will make your stomach turn. In another three years, you’ll be sitting where I am, in a spacious living room with the silver light of morning at your back, typing this message to the girl of our youth: you. Sweet, impassioned, amenable you—there are a few things I wish to say.

Your hair will always be curly. Your options are to continue waging war against your curls with flat irons, relaxers, and expensive treatments, or to just accept this as fact, allow your hair to exist in its natural state, and move on to more interesting matters.

By now your body knows the feeling of a Nevada summer— the way the sun bakes into your bones. You try to be strategic about your time in direct sunlight, tip-toeing in and out of the shade so you don’t get too dark. You tell your friends the heat has gotten to you. One day you’ll move away from the desert and mountains to a foggy, concrete city where you’ll mostly stare at screens inside cold buildings—you’ll wish you were back on those sagebrush-studded plains. You’ll miss the fever of summer radiating off your skin. You’ll miss the sun lighting you up from the inside. You want so badly to fall in love. This will happen more than once, and each time it will be with a white guy. This doesn’t seem odd to you now. You think you’ve just got a thing for white boys, and that’s all. But really you’ve got a thing for whiteness , the status it affords and the blackness it dilutes. Please, for God’s sake, go befriend someone who is the same color as you. Invest in relationships, romantic and otherwise, with people who aren’t white.

Teachers tell you you have a knack for writing, and you modestly accept their praise. You think you could be a writer one day, and I say you are one now. You’ve got notebooks full of short stories, but they all have white protagonists. Eventually a brown person will make it onto the page, and that person will be you, and this will be the most interesting story. You’ll have days where writing will feel difficult and lonely, but I urge you to keep going. Every story is taking you closer to your own, and the practice of putting words on paper is changing your life even now.

From where you are, the days feel long and infinite, elongating lazily like amorphous shadows, one swallowing the next. This feeling won’t last. Sometime after 29, you will grow increasingly aware of the number of days left in life, of the aging planet and how much of it you’re able to roam, of the lines that etch themselves further into the tops of your hands. You will wish that you were kinder to yourself—kinder to your skin—when you were young.

Don’t wait for 29. By then, things are not easily undone. Start where you are now, right there in that smoky bathroom with your half-flattened hair. Put down the straightener and look at your reflection in the mirror. I don’t care how awkward or stupid it feels, just think of one nice thing to say about your skin and say it out loud. Do this every day. It’s a small gesture that will grow more powerful each time. Eventually, it will take hold. I promise. C.

Dear Alicia (age 10), You used to think vampires lived in the walls of the middle school hallway bathroom. The women's room was right across from your dad's classroom, and you were always certain that if you weren't careful enough - ready to run as soon as the toilet flushed - you were definitely going to get eaten by those wall-monsters. I suppose it's always been easier for you to hide behind stories than to face the mundane truth. Dwarves must have come and stolen the toys you misplaced while you were a child. Your hair was made curlier from ingesting more too much macaroni and cheese. Your first family pet was a wookiee, in place of the everyday dog your parents adopted before you were born.

By the time you will reach high school, your game will be much more grounded in the lives of others than in the admittance of your own loneliness. Becky, who will self-harm instead of telling her parents that she never learned how to really feel anything. Shana, who will be afraid to believe she is beautiful because of how it redefines men's eyes in her life. Aaron, who will be too lost in the darkness of his own adolescent revolution to realize you are in love with him.

And what if I could go back and visit you as you once were? Would you lift your nose out of the fiction where you choose to hide every day? Or would you fold yourself deeper into your preferred pages? What part of my (I might say “our” instead since she’s talking to the younger version of herself and not someone else) life would you turn into a fairy tale instead of the truth?

I could tell you of the darkness first. Of the cousin who died from an accidental bullet to the head. Of the decade long friendship - turned romance that I had to hide, instead of to avoid breaking our mother's heart. Of the edge of a subway platform where I stood and wondered what it would really feel like to fall… I’d save the hope for last. The soul-pieces I’ve left along the the sideroads of London and Chicago and Rome. The words I’ve picked up to set each disparate bone back into place. The weight of my lover’s arms around me every night as I sleep. I want to still believe in your daydreams sometimes. Maybe I can be that visitor from the future you always hoped you’d meet someday. But without a time machine or honest means of linear travel, all I can really offer you is this promise...

...I’ll still get you a happily ever after.

Love, Alicia (age 30)