Celebrating Friendship And The Truth Of This Journey

I put too much pressure on my friend to understand pain that was not his to process.

A few curious readers have asked what really happened with my close friend from the beginning and ending of my “Beyond Black History” blog posts. “Where do you stand?” is the question most asked by readers and my newfound friends from the businesses on the trip. Before I could answer that, I had to understand what happened to us in the first place.

Over the past year, I had seen a side to us that scared me, a slightly dismissive and destructive side. I’d been wrestling with the origins of the disconnect for a long time. The misunderstandings and hostility existed years before the blog post.

So, I called him tonight. I didn’t even plan on doing that, but it felt so instinctual. He answered. For the first time in decades, despite all of the honest and embarrassing conversations close friends have, this particular one felt revealing and vulnerable in a new way.

There were many issues over the years I incorrectly blended together which we spoke about on our call. I always felt that people of color sympathized with each other’s pain, regardless of the cultural differences. That’s what I’ve known since childhood when I found a picture of my dad in New York City standing next to his good friend, a man of color, and both posing like two men you wouldn’t want to mess with. The stories! The stories and adventures and discrimination these men faced shaped my view of kindred spirits between communities of color. And when Beirut’s port exploded, I felt my friend didn’t care. That broke me. Instead of telling him how I felt, I stayed angry at his lack of questions and his lack of rage at problems he didn’t even know about.

I heard him tonight when he spoke, I mean really heard him, and I wondered why I had never heard those words before. Did I not ask, or did he not feel he could tell? He always cared, but admittedly expressed that he just doesn’t know the layers of their issues nor the histories behind them. I understood him, and there was nothing to forgive because he did nothing wrong. He can’t mourn in the visceral way I could because he doesn’t know the intricacies of the Lebanese people, their homeland, what it means to be Lebanese and to lose everything over and over again in their uniquely tragic ways. He has his own experience of being a Black man with a different sense of loss. I wondered why I didn’t ask him about that loss more.

I put too much pressure on my friend to understand pain that was not his to process. All the while, I had no clue of the daily struggles of his own experience. He never analyzed the ways I mourned for people of color; he just knew I did. I analyzed and criticized how he mourned for others.

We come to the critical and heartbreaking point: “well that’s just one person’s opinion.” Remember that part of the story in part 1?

I was nervous when I reminded him of the words that broke my heart so profoundly, and was hesitant to repeat them, fearing to revisit the damage. He spoke with a gentleness that had been missing in our conversations for years as he spoke of the different layers and nuances within the Black community. I thought of my new friend Akindele from Veg On The Edge and how he shared a similar sentiment of the Black community being so varied, experiences and backgrounds vastly different.

We’re good now. As long as we’re each other’s allies and close friends, we’ll be ok. I had been focusing on the ally part more than the friend part. Looking towards the future, I’m excited to share Lebanon with him at the right time and in the right mood, not in anger after a catastrophe. I’m excited for him to share more of his perspective on diversity and his experience.

I wanted to take him on that trip with me, and I think he was there in every paragraph, every word. He’s quite an amazing big brother, and I’m extremely proud to know him. We should talk about this poem by Hafiz until we reunite again. It’s that title: “We Should Talk About This Problem,” otherwise, it will never leave us alone. The truth of our journeys are not only poetic, they’re persistent.