suffocating(is just space)

white space is suffocating

i cannot tell you the first time 
i felt i was different. 

in fact, the inherent privelige of 
american white people is to be able 
to remember when they first felt out of joint, 
as if all their bones didn't quite 
fit in their skin. 

what i can tell you, 
is that one day i looked 
in the mirror 

and then at the american girls
surrounding me
and decided i was ugly. 

at some point 
i decided that i wanted 
to bleach my hair and 
straighten it 

and rub down my nose 
with a rock so it looked more 
like theirs or shave my legs 
so i had less hair, 

these (american white half irish white swedish 
my ancestors came over on the mayflower blond
blue eyed british) girls 
didn't know what they were doing. 

but the thing about white space is, 
when you try to point out the thing that is 
making it hard for you to breathe, 
it will not help if you do not know it's name, 
if the people around you do not know its name, 

so when a white boy had a crush on me
i could tell that my body held more worth, 
i could tell his crush had more worth, he was such a 
hero for liking me (that's not fair, i never asked for this, 
why should his like be unusual simply because i am different, 
i am not what everyone else is, if he is a hero then i am something 
inferior, less) but the suffocation eased 
if you are valuable to white people
then the white space eases, 

no one is guilty but 
at the same time everyone is 
because no one bothered to tell me that 
i too could be beautiful, 
because white space doesn't see differences. 

white space doesn't see how 
making fun of the ghorme sabzi that your 
mother cooked for you because it was your favourite food,
is the same as making fun of the dance you 
and your family do together to the music 
of your past, doesn't see the way people tell you 
you would look so pretty with your hair straightened, 

white space is exhausting and 
all encompassing, and 
i have met many, many white people 
fighting it too. 

white space made me write that line. 

white space makes white girls
look away when you talk about anything 
but feminism and climate change
(we are dying, we are dying in the streets 
and in our houses and on the border what 
do i have to do to get them to care, allah, 
people shooting up mosques and they do not care,)

white space is present even in
the fear you feel when peppering your english 
with your native language, 
you know that not everyone is so kind to people 
whose tongues are split in half 
by design, (so if one day i get killed because 
i smiled and said ya allah to praise my god then 
write on my gravestone that i was faithful to the end,) 

white space is slowly killing me. 

and you may not agree, 
but i can tell you 

that one day when i was six,
i looked in the mirror and decided 
i was ugly, 

and i started to feel a hand 
wrap around my neck.