Sora's Lament

A liberation and veneration piece written both from and to past versions of me.

Disclaimer: This was written in July 2025. A gentle and humble reminder that even your worst thoughts and emotions, deserve to be seen, felt, prayed for and loved (not acted upon).

It is the only way to disrupt the cycle. To evolve. To transmute suffering, pain, and trauma from darkness into healthy, loving practice. Do not be afraid to gaze at your reflection. Whether broken or whole. Do not be afraid to face the wailing of your spirit. Do not cast your shadow into a chasm to be forgotten. Dare to remember, liberate and show love and gratitude to every version of yourself that made it here today. Do not succumb to shame. Be the strength, the breath, the warmth you once so desperately cried out for. Choose to become an offering. I trust you. I see you. I love you, dear friend and reader. Thank you for existing alongside me.

“It is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”

Streaks of sunlight reflect off of the pristine granite of his mausoleum. Not a speck of dust floats in the air, new benches installed. His face etched into the windows, the artist attentive to every one of his scars and tattoos. Just as I peak through, Sora, his favorite Kingdom Hearts figurine, sits with his key-blade pointed to the skies, a declaration to the heavens at the head of his tombstone. Even after 8 years, I freshly mourn the death of a man whose feathers never ruffled amidst turbulence, my brother, who knew and welcomed the hearts and minds of many. A defender of light.

I spoke to my Step-dad yesterday, about life and worth. And love.

And it made me think of the life I’ve lived and parts of the childhood I knew.

I had great memories, tight-knit family and love, yes, but an inner-questioning swirls asking:

“Was it pitiful?”

I’d say I did pity myself a few times in life, that little girl in the back of my head. I imagine her round brown eyes, coiled curls and silent demeanor, clutching her Barbie “Princess and the Pauper” bookbag filled with Amber Brown books and a 64 pack of Crayola crayons (sharpener included). I pitied her longing eyes in so many ways.

lil ole me

How many times had she been neglected by the people who said they’d loved her?

Yes, there were good times but she can’t stomach that she wasn’t enough of a blessing for her own father to get his life together. Cycles of addiction, jail and emotional abuse tormented her summers. “I can be small” she says. “I can come along too” she utters. “I can be strong, I can endure it too, don’t leave” she whispers. Defiance was death.

Yes, there were others who loved her the best they knew, but it is a nauseating pain that she wasn’t enough of some “miracle” for him to change. To speak fondly of her. Softly to her. To remember, consider and regard her. No matter how much he’d kneel in front of her feet every summer and tell her how much he loved her and wanted to be a better father. I studied every wrinkle of his brow and dimpling of his face anticipating anger or joy milliseconds before he’d erupt. In a longing to know what I could do to ease his internal suffering, quell his fire enough for him to see me beyond the flames. To see that I cared. That I mattered in his life. That he was burning me. That I dared to cross the burning sands to reach him everyday, but as my feet lascerated and blistered, he sat in pristine condition, a blunt teetering on his lips.

Was I worthy of a fulfilling love?

My tears have been interrupted by girls posing for pictures in front of the burial.

He was human before his music, you know?

I’m glad I could sit here and be human. For a brief moment.

I think what I’m feeling is the thick of loneliness. Sunken deep in despair and hopelessness.

A loneliness that finally causes you to address the waters growing from knee to hip.

Not loneliness by way of “I’m alone”, moreso, that I had been afraid to discuss my tempestuous thoughts to those who only knew me in my light. In the ferocious righteousness of my flames. But I couldn’t bring myself to admit that the smoke had been suffocating me. “If I could just hold this light a little longer.” I was gasping for air, my once relentless radiance reduced to glowing, fragile embers, a dark wilderness growing around me. I couldn’t find my way back. I knew this feeling from my past and I promised I’d never go there again.

I questioned whether anyone in my life was skilled enough to swim in the honesty and depths of these waters alongside me.

The torrential waters I knew. The silent dying day by day.

The ocean swells, the clouds brewing static in the distance.

I’d be coming face-to-face with death soon. Alone.

And I didn’t want to bear this cross on my own.

And I knew I couldn’t run.

There’s nothing worse than revealing the depth of your soul to someone and watching them drown.

Running out of the water with a tail tucked between their legs. Shaking. Wretching.

Hearing the screech of a lifeguard’s whistle as he gathers and alerts everyone of danger.

Tossing cones around your shore advising people not to enter.

On the other hand, some idolize and worship these waters as divine.

Remaining a form of distancing themselves from entering.

I’d been recognized but not known. Not heard. Not understood. Not seen. Not touched.

From a young age, I was taught and reinforced to build impenetrable familial bonds to endure the warships of the world.

Even now amidst the disturbances in our complex relationships, they refuse to face me. So, they tuck tails and hide amongst the people. Pointing fingers at everyone but themselves. The least we could do is stack our crosses and bear the weight of them: our mistakes, our misunderstandings, our truths, our transgressions together.

---

---

I sit at this grave, reminded of my mourning 8 years ago. The period of time I craved death like Sunday dinners. Hallowed eyes, pale skin, gray hands and fingernails. Sitting in hospital beds awaiting diagnoses, blood tests, MRI’s that didn’t matter because I’d planned to take my own life in a few days anyway. It’s insanity, I’m aware, but in the month I’d given myself to say my subtle goodbyes, it was the first time I remember truly living. 30 days. I remember when my heart began to slow to a stop in that hospital bed in 2021, I hate to admit I was grateful that day. I was grateful that my family and friends wouldn’t have to bear witness to my silent struggle and the fact that I’d lost to my own mind before the illness had the chance to consume me. I remember the day my mother introduced me to her new friend months prior, a sweetheart, and I cried because I was so grateful there would be someone to hold her when I was gone. I prayed the illness would take me before my hands did, so it could give them closure and understanding, and when it didn’t, I had to face the bottle of pills staring back at me on the bathroom countertop. I did the math. It was enough to avoid the embarrassment of a failed attempt.

And I remember the phone call from a stranger that saved me on my 30th day, when all time ran out to find any loophole for hope, a crumb of desire to continue living. Her name was Chris. A secret we shared.

Who am I that God could be so, so mindful of me?

The sun steadies its rays and warmth on my face as the clouds pass.

The hug that I never got to give my brother in his last moments. The deep thank you.

He didn’t deserve to walk into death alone. Confused, compressing his leaking vessel as his limbs went numb.

The world recorded his last moments, his gurgled gasps for help, an inhumanity which nearly 10 years later, I can’t quite understand or forgive.

He was always there for his friends and comrades. Even when we were afraid.

An overconfident, fearless Kamina.

I remember the feeling of being saved from the depths of myself by the light of a dead man.

Like a buoy for a drowning boy.

A lighthouse near the pier.

Letting you know the journey was long, but you’re closer to shore.

That someone is expecting your arrival.

The comforting glow of a porch light being on after a late night.

He knew what it meant to see and welcome all of me. Shadows and trenches were nothing to him. He brought scuba gear to teach me how to love the intricate depths of my waters. Taught me of all the life that lived there. He’d point out all the colorful corals, sea angels, dealfishes and rummaging dumbo octopi illuminating throughout.

Where did I first grasp the belief that I would die alone?

That I would not know love in this lifetime?

That I wouldn’t know partnership?

That I wouldn’t know trust?

And so I worked. And work praised me back. Saw me in exchange.

But it demanded all of me.

I was scared I might die at my own hands.

Or that I might die at the hands of the very people, the very community I loved and lived for. I’d known that pain. I’d lived for them witnessing their freedoms.

And I was betrayed once they received it.

Cut out like a cancer. And they watched me bleed out, with teary, apologetic eyes, whispering that they loved me.

That my work,

my ideas,

my love

was life changing as they readied and cast their stones.

Whispering in my ear of “my greatness” with every shank and twist of the dagger.

A death like that of Julius Caesar.

But I wasn’t a tyrant.

I was a human that laid all my cards on the table to fight for what was just. I’d often encountered people that tried to excise my brain from the rest of my body. To collect and experiment with what they could of my ideas and projects as if I was a cadaver.

I’d imbued my heart, my very essence into so many movements. So many people. So many organizations. But damn, did I feel used. My work ethic was praised, my projects and awards too, but all too often my soul was separated and discarded. “Too radical, too risky, too intense” they’d say.

I was not palatable within the forces of iniquity. Nor did I ever want to be, but by the time I’d realized I was feasting on the bait, I’d already been shot.

Is love radical?

Is fighting for love revolutionary?

I always thought God would collect me on that death-day and I would return to nothingness.

Return to the abyss that I am. That, I knew.

Could heaven exist for someone that knew numbness and the atrocities of people like I did? How could I allow myself a “heaven” with the amount of suffering I’d endured on Earth?

I wonder if that’s a feeling God knows.

So the galaxies float, peering over at us.

Studying and growing.

Offering hope to a solitary realm.

Other than my flesh, I am not of the material world.

And for that reason, I suffer. I suffer this paradox. Housing spirit within flesh. Housing light in darkness. How do we steady ourselves as beings of God-consciousness within a realm that worships the wealth of mortality?

I yearn for love in a way that makes everything, even me, possible.

Makes conception possible.

Makes my spirit feel settled in a realm I have yet to understand, even after 24 years.

I’d endured being the disposed leader.

The disposed friend.

The disposed daughter.

Was it easy to dispose of me when my spirit became grandiose?

Inconvenient?

Rampant and unleashed?

Treasures and destinies which refused to yield to anyone other than me?

Was it easy in this realm to publicly assassinate the spirits and voices of Black dreamers?

My brother died a spiritual martyr, robbed and assassinated by the very community he sought to restore.

Did every truly great man and woman once come to bear this cross from the very people they loved? Did they die lonely deaths? Had they ever once felt seen in community?

Was I expendable in the eyes of God?

I’d died fragments of this silent death everyday. For as long as I could remember. In hopes that my love for community will save me, more than I felt I could save myself.

How could love salvage me when I’d succumbed to this static desolation?

Why should it? Why should love know my struggles?

Is it selfish to expose this darkness in hopes light can illuminate it? Does love deserve that fate?

None of this makes sense.

These two guys arrived, unquestionably kneeling amongst the pebbles in prayer.

After they finish an “Amen” in unison, they rise with dimpled, rosey red knees, dusting dirt of their shins.

They tell me how my brother had always been an inspiration to them.

How his words held them in moments they didn’t have the strength to keep going.

I needed that strength today.

They mentioned it was a desire of theirs to pray in his presence here.

To thank him.

The freshly rolled blunt teetering in the corner of his mouth as he talks.

They walked away with a subtle wave turning to tell me in the midst of my wet eyes:

“Jesus loves you.”

Thank you for breaking bread with me in this space.

Dare to remember, dare to surrender, dare to forgive yourself and others, dare to become an offering. I trust you. I see you. I love you, dear friend.