When I close my eyes, the world is such a big place. With my imagination the possibilities are endless. My mind races as each corner of the world is filled with thoughts that if other people could hear, they would interpret them as insanity.

I close my eyes and the world is still. I am the world, the world is me. I am nobody, the world is nobody.

Figures taking up space, eyes looking around, places to go, people to see, dreams and end goals simultaneously working together to make one world.

I close my eyes and the world is such a small place, my world, the world that others can’t see, and won’t see. My heart fills as the memories of growing up come back to the surface and remind me of my world, not the world you have painted for me.

I hear the creak of the swings, the rush of running away, and suddenly become tense as the slide that was once just a trademark of my childhood now turns and represents the slippery slope, the path of my life.

I watch as my world becomes bigger, bringing me back to the reality that it isn’t my world.

I never left much. Staying in the comfortable, staying in the safe, staying in my own little corner of a world I had yet to realize was being shaped for me, without me.

I watched her every day as she came and went, cherishing the minutes we had grasping onto the next one. I knew that she was doing it for me. She wants the world for me, a world I can make my own, a world where my hardest doesn’t have to be four steps ahead of everyone else. A world where my hardest is my hardest, not just mediocre in comparison.

She told me that he loved me. She told me he would call back. She told me I was different; even though I watched as it hurt her. I watched as she had to explain to me why you always asked me questions about slavery, why you always looked at me differently, why you told me, a nine year old girl wanting her own world, to “go back to where I came from.”

He does love me, he does call back and he is there for me. A human being made a mistake, yet because of his skin color he is deemed a bad father. Every Sunday, he reminds that there is something more than what you have allocated for me, that you have allocated for us.

My faith is mine, unlike everything you have given to me with a false label and false hope. If it’s mine it is not yours. If it’s mine, you cannot take it and morph it into something you think is mine. If it’s mine, no one else can have it. This is the one thing you have mistakenly given to me without realizing that it is my one escape from the grasp of your words, your thoughts and your assumptions.

I close my eyes and take the slide back to the younger version of myself. I was standing at the front of the room as you asked me to read. I closed my eyes only to open them to the same words I didn’t know. Word after word, I watched as you got more frustrated dismissing me back and telling me to learn more.

You told me to learn when I didn’t know how. You told me to learn when I wanted to know how. You told me to learn, yet sent me back to the place I had already been. I went home to the safe haven, to the limited minutes, determined as ever to come back and to have learned.

I walk down the hallway anxiously awaiting the moments where you can easily point out our difference. I walk down the hallway as my own person, my own style, my own being, just trying to find my way in my own world waiting for you to accept it.

I close my eyes and spin down the slide into the spiral that you created for me. I close my eyes, realizing that when you look at me all you see is my skin, and not what I see.

I see the product of a loving mother, a strong community; you see my skin, my gender and my clothes. Within 30 seconds, you have already determined what food I like, my intelligence, who my father is and who I am. You have determined my world. A world you force me to live in without realizing the fate you put on it.

A world where I don’t hate purple cool-aid, I have no choice in liking watermelon and where you are not always right.

I close my eyes and watch as the spiral gets tighter and the inability to become myself suffocates me. I live a life based on hard work. Forced upon me as normal because you veiw minority as inferiority.

I am not a type you can name and assume. I am a work in progress headed down a path given to me by my world, not your world. My world is a constant fight for who I am, up against who you think I am. Who you think we are. Minority is for culture, not for human beings.

I close my eyes as the fiery balls of hell inspire me that I am far from living it. I am strong. I am independent. I am successful. I am different. I am not a broken shape of a type you put me in. I am not a minority. I am a human being forced to be better thanks to you.

This is my world, a world you refuse to see, yet a world you only wish you could be.