This morning, I’m sitting in my birthday suite (ayyyyeeee!) in Marseille overlooking the port, watching the boats come and go, and listening to Brooklyn Duo’s rendition of Coldplay’s “Yellow.”
“Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you…”
And I’m thinking about something my grandmother used to tell me.
She said she saw me before I was born.
In her vision, she saw a little girl with long braids. When my sister was born, my grandmother said, “No, that’s not her.”
The brother closest to me in age is eleven years older than I am. My mother was done having children. She had even had her tubes tied. So when my grandmother insisted that she had seen another little girl, my mother told her, essentially, “I don’t know what you saw, but that is not my child.”
And then, I pop out like the Kool-Aid man.
Years later, my grandmother and I were riding the Q2 bus from Hollis to Jamaica Avenue. She looked at me and realized that the little girl sitting beside her, with long braids, was the exact girl she had seen all those years before.
My grandmother didn’t see me as a baby. She saw a girl I would have to grow into.
She imagined me before I was considered possible.
I keep thinking about that because, in many ways, it has been the story of my life.
I remember sitting in traffic on I-95 one day. The highway was packed, bumper to bumper, with people fighting to move a few feet ahead, cutting one another off just to sit in the same traffic together. I looked around and thought, “This is crazy. We should not be living like this.”
When I said that to folks, the response was essentially, “Well, that’s what everybody does.”
And I remember thinking, “Yeah, okay.”
That “yeah, okay” doesn’t mean I agree. It means I recognize that we are not even having the same conversation.
They were telling me what is common. I am asking whether it is necessary.
They were describing what people have accepted. I am asking what else might be possible.
They were committed to what is. I am asking, “What if?”
Some people find it unbearable to travel alone. I find it liberating. People ask me if I ever feel lonely, and I don’t. There are worlds within worlds inside my head.
But there is a particular kind of loneliness I feel sometimes.
It isn’t the loneliness of having no one around. It is the loneliness of being unaccompanied in how I perceive the world, in the patterns I notice, the structures I question, and the possibilities I can imagine.
What is unbearable to me is being around people to whom I must explain myself over and over again. People who treat convention as fact. People who never look beyond what is to ask, “What if?”
That kind of disconnection is painful to me. Sometimes it feels physically painful. It is pointing toward something beyond the accepted structure while the people around me keep explaining the structure back to me, as though its existence proves its wisdom.
I have realized that explaining myself more clearly will not bridge the distance. The problem isn’t language, we are standing in different relationships to reality.
So I say, “Yeah, okay,” and keep moving.
I think that is why I became a futurist, although perhaps I was one long before I had language for it. My grandmother practiced a kind of futures thinking with me. She held an image for which the present offered no evidence. She did not need anyone else to agree with what she saw. She held it until, one ordinary day on the Q2 bus, time revealed it.
And now I am sitting in this suite in Marseille, thinking about how different my life would be if I had stopped asking “what if.”
What if I don’t have to remain inside a life that is diminishing me?
What if work does not have to consume me?
What if rest, beauty, pleasure, travel, flowers, art, and freedom are allowed to matter?
What if the life people have accepted is not the only life available to me?
I would not be sitting here if I had allowed “that’s what everybody does” to become the final answer.
Maybe this is another Q2 bus moment. Maybe I am looking around and recognizing a life I once saw before I had evidence that I could live it.
The woman who left home for France in August is not the woman sitting here in France now. But perhaps this woman was already there, waiting for me to grow into her.
My grandmother saw me before I arrived.
My mother and grandmothers loved me toward a future they could not see for themselves, but somehow knew existed for me.
And now, as “Yellow” plays, I’m looking at the life around me and thinking about the stars shining for me and all the things I have done.
Some futures cannot be argued into existence.
I hold the vision. I keep asking, “What if?” I say, “Yeah, okay,” to the people who cannot see it, and I keep moving.
Then, one ordinary day, I look up and realize: Oh.
There she is.
“Look at the stars. Look how they shine for you…”