on: claiming space

(note: i'm using italics to denote past tense because i wrote this last night.)

7/11 7:51pm

lie on your back. look up at the sky. make out shapes of the skyline of the city. your city. a city you've loved and hated to love and fallen back in love with more than you can count.

listen to one of your favorite artists. remember that being a dancer in femi kuti's band is still a bucket list item of yours. sing and sway to the music. marvel that you've seen femi a dozen times if you've seen him once, and tonight you get to enjoy it for free.

ignore the group of men slowly encroaching on your space. stepping on your beach towel. standing directly behind you while you sit and sway and sing. close enough for you to notice but feeling disrespected because the boundaries of the little bit of space you carved out for yourself are being breached. they won't make eye contact, maybe because they're standing and you're sitting. they won't even offer a beer or say excuse me as they step dangerously close.

you are tired. this show is supposed to temporarily ease the burden on your shoulders and make the bridge across your back a little more tolerable.

you feel yourself getting smaller even as you want to raise your voice and remind the interlopers of your presence. you are not invisible, nor indestructible. but you are tired. tired of feeling less than.

so you look at the sky. briefly close your eyes and meditate on a power that is greater. remind yourself that even in the small space you currently find yourself occupying, you are exactly where you're supposed to be. sit up. stretch. smile. smirk at the group of men when one of them breaks their styrofoam cooler by trying to sit on the lid. sit and sway and sing. let the music literally and figuratively move you. say thank you and amen.
 

we're up all night to...

i went to ravinia last night with a few girlfriends. we'd had these tickets for months and we were all excited and there was plenty of wine and laughter, as there should be on a friday night on the lawn, i think.

duran duran was the headliner, but i was really way more interested in hearing chic and nile rodgers. nile is a musical god among mortals and given how incredibly awful 2016 has been for celebrity deaths, i wanted to make sure i got the chance to hear, if not see, nile in person at least once.

at one point during the show, i wondered aloud about the chances of our hearing any daft punk and told my friends that i would probably lose my shit (in a good way) if it happened. shortly thereafter, nile told the crowd about when he was diagnosed with cancer, his thought was to get his affairs in order. by that, he meant he was going to write and produce as much as he could while he still could, and "get lucky" came out of that. nile is now cancer free, thank the gods, and we all know how massive a hit "get lucky" turned out to be.

"we've come too far to give up who we are..." i totally went to church during 'get lucky' live & i'm not sorry. thank you, @nilerodgers.

— lady black (@queeneulalia) July 9, 2016

i have listened to and sang that particular lyric 100 times if i've done it once, but never before had it resonated so powerfully as it did last night. maybe it's because chic slowed down the tempo for that particular part of the song. maybe it's because the woman singing it sounded great. maybe it's because this week has been nothing short of insane. maybe it was a combination of all of those things. i totally ugly cried at ravinia and a tiny bit of the pain i've been carrying from this week lifted ever so gently, just for those few minutes.

my friends and i were walking home from the metra late last night and we passed a boutique's window display for a boutique. i spotted this, shrieked as if i'd seen a ghost, and grabbed one of my friends to come look at it to make sure i wasn't hallucinating.

i went back to that boutique today and bought this print. the one i saw in the window was a bit larger than i wanted, so i wound up with the only 8x10 print that they had of this.

i haven't decided if i'm going to put this up at work or add it to my collection of prints that i'm saving for when i move, but clearly i was meant to have this. it needed to happen, just like i needed to have that moment at ravinia last night.

sometimes the universe is all "hey, i know things are incredibly shitty, but here's a little tiny something to brighten your day." this falls into that category.