little lights

XIII

When all your friends start having sex, and all you've ever let anybody do to you is hold your hand and kiss the already-exposed skin, lying back on the blankets of a bed in a room that has not been re-decorated since you finally got boobs, you feel like you're falling behind

If your sexual experiences were being graded on a curve, you would be failing your class, and when they run their fingertips over your hair and tell you how pretty and different it is, you wish you could trade with them because different is great, but average is better

When your first boyfriend treats your skin tone like a fetish, tells you he loves you while he kisses the darkest bits of your skin, jokes about it like it doesn't matter, thinks it's not racist if he says the n-word because his girlfriend is black-- please dump him

How does it feel to be ranked? You are a number on a list of girls, and you are somewhere in the middle because who cares about intelligence or eloquence or accomplishments when the smooth curve of your hips and the flutter of your eyelashes makes you pretty (for a black girl)

The boy you have liked since the day you read about hormones in your father's medical journal tells you that he doesn't date black chicks, but no, he's not a racist. He kisses you with the lips he uses to bite down on your heart, chew, and swallow it whole. Then he dates a blonde girl.

Your teachers are pleasantly surprised when you show up to class in a sweater set. Your pencil skirt and Oxford shoes make you different from the rowdy black kids in the back, while you sit front and center and raise your hand. They stay an extra step back from the other black kids.

It seems like each time a black boy hits on you, he is put off by you. The way you 'sound white' or the way you're unimpressed by his sexist pick-up lines and expensive sneakers-- but there is a boy with dark skin that loves math even more than you do, and you wonder if he's been turned off to black girls the way you have to boys; used to the racism from every race, including your own

When your English teacher recruits you for the debate team, you have to explain several times that you're not mixed. "Yes, both my parents are black," you explain. How can that be, when you walk like you eat filet mignon and speak like you're addressing the president?

The first girl you ever kissed is white. Her skin is ghostly pale; it's winter and she's got freckles and strawberry blonde hair, and to you it was just a dare, but to her it was an experience. Her first real kiss, but she can't date you, not with the way your skin tones combine to make caramel. You don't care... much

Your parents are the best people you know, with their well-paying jobs and their encouraging words, you are blessed to be an upper-middle class child in a four-bedroom home with a walk-in closet, but you were born into a body that makes people assume otherwise, why is the shape of your cheekbones and the sharp contrast from the back of your hand to your palm a measure of your wealth?

You are not ignorant by any means, you know that the vast majority of people on this earth are not geniuses, but you still question why your brain has been hardwired to avoid walking past black men, and to trust kind-eyed white women with toddlers on their hips, you are not afraid of your father, whose skin is hot coffee and mahogany, but you fear your sister's boyfriend at first glance

So when your friends all start having sex, and you feel like you're falling behind, you start to question whether it's even possible for someone to like you enough to want to be intimate with you. Is your skin color a sign you're not worthy of love, and if only you'd been born with blonde hair and blue eyes, where is the boy that does not see your natural hair as a fetish and does not care if when you mix your skin together it makes a new color? Where is the boy that sees past the varying tones in your skin and the way you pronounce words and just likes you for your smile and your heart and the toaster you invented?