it took an obscene amount of time to realize what kind of role music played in my life.

for someone - within the realms of human fallibility - who is very reflective and reasonably self aware, it’s almost as if i never considered. as if someone had to press my face into the glass in order to be able to clearly see.

what i also didn’t quite grasp - is that that role is incredibly, inextricably linked to my family. 

the details of my family life, for now, are private. relegated to my journals and clandestine calls with friends. for now, simply understand that i have always felt a little bit outside of, and a little bit abandoned by my family. these are people who love me deeply, but again, within the realms of human fallibility, are flawed. amongst the blooming foliage of my ample family tree lies thorns. over the course of my childhood, my life, some of the darker, twistier parts of my personhood was shaped by that pain. and for that reason, discomfort stood in the forefront of my mind as the core characteristic of my relationship with my family.

transparently, some of the more challenging events in my history with my family have occurred within the past two years. after engaging in a lot of personal work, however, these events have also allowed me to find a deeper connection to my bloodline. you see, for all the pain delivered, my family has given me a lot of joy amongst other gifts. the most precious and special of these gifts was music. 

i stared at a patch of dirt - a garden bed, i believe, over the edge of the porch in residential west virginia. i saw something glimmering from the dirt, and quickly moved to unearth it. “keith sweat”, the cassette read. that’s one of my earliest memories, to me, a perhaps overly symbolic representation of my roots. my earliest memories of my mother involve her cleaning the house to prince’s purple rain album. i knew my mother loved him, and partially because of that, i did too.

the only girl of four children, my mother also has three brothers. i use the word has, because even though my uncle damon has transitioned, he is still her brother. he’s quite possibly even more my uncle than before. an uncle that in his earthly life moonlighted as my father. as i comb through my memories i quickly find another downward view, staring at faith evans’s “faithfully” album. i’m at his huge, mahogany desk in his family’s computer room. the years have whisked away the details of whether he bought that album for me or i just carried it with me on one of many, one of what feels like hundreds of weekends at his house. undoubtedly our most obvious connection was music - okay maybe fashion. but the music ranks pretty high up on the list.