سرکشی Let the Scanners Fail
The crack begins with the gaze.
Unknown eyes skim me like a barcode at the border—checking: permissible? passable? Their pupils are scanners, their silence a clipboard. I feel my face rearrange itself into compliance; afterwards, I am left counting the bones of my own doubt. I audition for rooms I already built, then fail myself in the hallway.
There is a pattern, a choreography of lack. I throw little flares into the day so the light lands on me—plots, performances, staged coincidences—trying to make up for those Portobello High School afternoons: the limp sandwich, the laminate table, my brown hand rehearsing invisibility in a sea of curated white. No one to blame and yet everything is implicated: diaspora is a tug, an ache that stains even the tenderest thought. I wanted to be them, clean-lined and unbothered, to speak without my throat remembering the border. I wanted attention to backpay the years of being looked through.
Loneliness lives in the body like weather. Not the absence of people—God knows there were crowds—but a long corridor of air between rib and rib. Some days I can name it; other days it smears my mouth with fog. I hold its paradoxes like two wires humming in the same hand: the hurt and the voltage that keeps me moving. The crack isn’t a defect; it’s a door. I step through and meet the furnace—the burning heart that keeps a ledger of everything I’ve loved and everything that left.
I hunger for the constant love, the one without a handle. I practice substitutes: a blue-lit catechism, a ritual of the hand, pixels and bodies—familiar and unfamiliar—summoned to hush the ache. Lust as aspirin. Relief as algorithm. The fix arrives quick, evaporates quicker, and I scroll to the next altar. Even pleasure grows thin when it has to stand in for prayer.
Still, the crack teaches. A seam holds because it was once opened. I am learning to turn the gaze back, to stare at myself without inventory, to stop asking permission from mirrors that never learned my language. Let the eyes scan. Let the scanners fail. I am not here to pass; I am here to persist—brown, off-script, stitched by weather and ancestry, carrying my loneliness like a lantern. In its light, I see the room as it truly is, and I step inside without apologizing for the noise my heart makes when it wants more.