Metro Tale: One

So I’ve decided that the best way to start this blog thing is by using my free time to create posts. The greatest amount of free time I have in the day is riding the DC Metro from Farragut West to Georgia Petworth every night from school. It can be a long trek at times; the metro here is slow and often unreliable. So between 11 and 12;30 every night I’m flush with time, and I figure, why not jot down some stories of my life instead of paying attention to the drunk guy play with himself in the seat across from me.

I felt compelled to start this blog after a conversation I had with a classmate today. I’ve had in my mind the desire to write a blog for sometime now, but never could call up the will to do it, until now. It’s appropriate that the aforementioned conversation be the topic of my first metro tale.

She is a classmate of mine. From the first time I saw her, I knew there was something different about her. Black women don’t usually come in this variety. Not vanilla, not chocolate. If “fun” were an edible flavor, it would be the most adequate to describe her.

Through the course of the year we eventually met one another. I knew I had to meet her at some point, she seemed so much… like me. Of course I wouldn’t know that, and truthfully, I still don’t know that, but after the conversation we had today, I feel the connection had become… more. And I don’t mean to give the wrong impression; I don’t like va-jay-jay. But platonic relationships can also result in emotional catharsis, and that’s what I’m looking for here.

I was supposed to be studying—in the basement of the library—but instead I was watching a video of some conservative Connecticutans (?) decrying the passage of the gay marriage bill in their state. Of course, the discourse was one more of inadvertent hilarity than sobriety, so I let out a few chuckles, which brought the attention of my friend.

She came over and insisted on knowing what was prompting my laughter. I gave her a listen, and she found the conservative dribble as ridiculous as I did. After watching the videos, she suddenly became interested in me. The debate about homosexuality inspired some emotion in her that she thought we shared, and I admitted to her, that yeah, I was “different” too.

She opened up; elementary, middle school, high school, the Black people thought something was wrong with her. Growing up in Brooklyn, she did not act like every other black woman. So the men, the black men, would call her a lesbian whenever she rebuffed their advances (she is not a lesbian). I empathized: “The difference between you and me is that there is a attitude of misogyny among people like that; you had it worse than I did because you’re a woman.” She concurred and she was grateful. And as her boyfriend came by to pick her up, she told me “I feel like there’s so much I want to talk to you about… but I don’t know what to say.”