Living Abroad for 6 weeks

 Black thoughts, Black Breath: Being away from America for only six weeks is a reset. I feel like I've been breathing with one lung my entire life. I have worked with one lung, I have lived and gone about my life. Most days I don't complain, I can smile, dance, achieve. I minimized my discomfort with the fake solace that everyone else was breathing with the same capacity. Then someone comes along and drains the other lung and I take that first huge breath with a full set and... there is just so much more oxygen. I have so much more energy in each breath. My smile is fuller, I laugh more, and I realize that I've been minimizing and underestimating my condition. 

If you told the old me that he was breathing with one lung, he wouldn't have believed you. He would have thought a) you're exaggerating and it's not that bad or b) everyone else is breathing with one lung too. "Effie we all got pain." 

I didn't know. Despite all the Black artistic ancestors who fled America for Paris, London, Barcelona, Ghana and suddenly discovered they had an explosion of creativity, a surge of light and air. Despite all the countless examples I really did think 'well that was back then and it's not really the same now.' 

I intellectually understood the Black expats in Berlin and Paris who felt their blood pressure dropped 10 points when they left the States for good. I understood but I didn't emotionally know what that really means until I experienced it.

And yet...

America is still where big cultural stuff happen. Amidst the poisoning and mass shooting, and drowning, this is the nation that cranks out the big deals. The big music, big events, big moments like no other. In every city I go to, I hear American music. Covered, remixed, re-conceived. As I picked out dragon fruit in a Nicaraguan grocery store I heard a very bad local singer covering "I Will Always Love You" followed by a medley of American classics re-sung by Nicaraguans. As I went into a Cape Town Airport bathroom I could hear through the walls an airport worker pumping Notorious B.I.G's 'Juicy." When I was in a shipping store in downtown Cape, a clerk asked me what I did. When I told him he blurted out 'do you know Tyler Perry?' I realized this was a dead-ass serious question and that this person YEARNED for me to know Tyler and to be in his circle because this person loved Tyler Perry and -as a side effect- loved America and as an even more subtle side effect- loved me by proxy. I was cool b/c I was from the place that gave this clerk Madea. I nodded like 'oh yeah, I forgot America does this thing where our culture just sprays out everywhere.'

What do you do when the thing you love to do is being done at the highest level in a place that shortens your breath and raises your blood pressure by just being?