Looking at the moon

Some nights a memory comes back on its own. I was walking down a road with a friend, back to the dormitories, and it was cold. A car came up behind us. Its headlights ran over the pavement, over our shoes, over the wall ahead, and then the car was past, and out of it came a word meant for me. I never saw a face. I saw the tail lights go red at the corner and then nothing. The word arrived after the car had already gone. I told my friend it was fine. I told myself the same thing. It is still there.

The people I admire look nothing like me. This is a source of happiness, most days. They are everywhere: mathematicians, physicists, people who built things, people who went places. I know them by what they left behind. A proof on a board. A line in a textbook. A lamp that comes on because one of them worked something out a century ago. Some of them would not have wanted me in the room. The equation is on the board and the person who found it is not, and would not have looked up if they were.

My ancestors read a book that told them the stories had all been told. I do not say this against them. They lived in a country where that book was the whole sky, and they looked up at it the way you look up at anything too large to argue with. I read it too. When I believed in the One Above I never questioned their will. They cared about me. They had given me a will of my own so that I could act, and change things. Then the belief went, quietly, the way a light goes off in a house you have already left, and what remained was an imaginary friend who had never once loved me back. Why did you do this, I asked. I asked it upward. I had already stopped believing there was anyone up there to ask.

They are still here, my ancestors, in the nucleus of every cell. In the shape of my face and the color of my skin and the actual material of me. Maybe I should be grateful. I am the end of a line that did not end, billions of years of it, and nearly every branch beside mine went nowhere. So maybe they did alright.

Yesterday I saw a cloud shaped like a rabbit. The cloud did not decide to be a rabbit. I did. It hung there being water, and I gave it ears. I did not decide what my skin would be to whoever was in the car, either. They did, from a distance, the same way.

Here is the strange part. I have never seen myself. Not once, not directly. I have seen light that left my face, hit a mirror, and came back. I have seen photographs, which are the same thing with a delay. Everyone I pass on the street has seen me more directly than I ever will, and what they see first is the one thing I cannot see at all.

Go be with your people, someone might say. Fine. Who are they? The ones with my hair? The ones who read the same book? My brother is the one who sees me. My sister is the one whose first thought of me is not my skin but the thing we share, which is that we are both here, briefly, on a rocky planet, and both of us want to know how it works. We do not look the same. We are alike. What I see in the mirror is a man from Ethiopia, raised between two countries, who loves mathematics and deep learning more than is probably reasonable. The mirror is the only thing that has ever shown me that, and the mirror is backwards.

Who I am is a question I have not answered. I assume the answer was written into the initial conditions along with everything else, and that I am only now reading it off.

Some nights I think being black is like looking at the moon. There is enough light to walk home by. All of it comes from somewhere I will never stand, and none of the warmth comes with it.