#tryingtogetfree

[aimingforfine-blog]

why i don’t social dance

tonight. i am reminded to be careful what we say to folks we don't know. i found myself on the dance floor for the first time in a while. i found myself. free and following a beat. my own beat. two shots in. and i just wanted to move. i did. playful and smiling and building freedom in a presumed safe space. 

silly, silly me. 

"i just wanted you to know that you dance really well but you smell bad." and in one sentence. tears pushed against my lids. this man. this body. this smell. it's been a long day. filled with suppressed pettiness. and dance rehearsals and a day job. and now my sweating black body is seeking comfort in movement. yes sir i do smell. it is my smell that in the moment i couldn't own because under your voice is my own. confirming what you said. and andy tells me that if i were a man. or if i was there dancing with a man he wouldn’t have approach me. if i wasn’t a solitary black woman in a heterosexual white mans’ space he wouldn’t have said that to me. 

and i, just searching for a single moment. a single space where i can feel completely free. where i can dance with no repercussion. without fear and i am reminded that my freedom. my 5 minutes or 60 minutes of absolute forgetfulness doesn’t exist. i am reminded in my haven. in my city that i am still a smelly brown woman trying to dance to forget. trying to dance to lift the weight of my skin. oh my dear god. grant me freedom. just an ounce.

and it’s silly. if i were po’chop i would’ve told him that he is lucky to have smelled me. that the only reason he feels comfortable enough to approach me and spill those words onto me is because i am a woman. a black women that his systemic soaked patriarchal brain registers as less.

thicker skin i tell myself.

you should know better

who the fuck do you think you are that you deserve a sense of freedom.

who the fuck are you sis?

you are a speck in a sea of fucking suffering