“I’ll be with you in just a minute” her eyes darted back and forth synchronized with the whirl of her movements. She had already been assisting another customer across the room, and I had listened to the conversation for minutes when I entered. I stood at the counter, surveying the myriad of nutrients with voracious eyes that took in the many splendors of all that was laid out before me. She may have noticed how quickly I was assessing the food behind the counter, maybe it was the tap of my shoe or the clink of keys in my hand that caused her to speed up her movements, but by the time I had looked back up, she was looking at me somewhat squarely-almost with a smile, “How may I help you today?”

I told her what I wanted with fits and starts, I could feel the weight of my distant hairline begin to pool in the furrow of my brow. “Is this your first time here?” she asked. I responded in the affirmative. It was something in the way she replied that gave it away, her nervous laugh over the clinking of the steel bowl “Are you employed?” She asked in an easy congeniality that I knew was supposed to break the ice. Still, given what I suspected were her intentions, the question stung. I was standing before her in my full uniform, scrubs, jacket all adorned with the logo of a practice that I had created, run, and owned for several years.  I dared not mention that because I had known in the past what the response would likely have been; a blank stare and complete puzzlement.

She feigned politeness with a devouring curiosity as she set to work and would occasionally look up as she was plating. I marveled how her eyes seemed to focus on a point somewhere in the distance that was slightly past my shoulder.  I tried in vain to see if her eyes would focus on me. 

“Are you from here? “she asked… hesitating for a quick minute before clarifying “Originally?”

So, I responded with a simple “Yes.”   She quickly diverted back to the original line of questioning.

“Oh, is this your break then?” She smiled while keeping her eyes fixated to plating.

“A quick one.” I briefly smiled back in her direction, hoping that her movements would increase with speed as well.

“Well, I hope your shift goes well.” Her voice was cheerful, but her eyes betrayed a flicker of something else as she awkwardly extended my to-go bag.

 

I nodded, took the bag, and turned to leave, a familiar heat rising over my skin. The interaction had the sting of alcohol on a wound, the sharp discomfort of micro-aggressions that exfoliate the soul. The encounter—routine, almost expected—was a probing, a subtle dissection of my existence, layered with assumptions I had long grown tired of countering.

 

It was such a simple interaction and one that I have numerous times a day in the outside world. I say outside because even in the place in which I currently reside, I have created spaces to inhabit and fill with my will and light. I have conscientiously built these places so that I can exist. I know that in the outside world, I do not.

My overall annoyance was not that a simple trek to get food turned into a game of “Who are you and where did you come from?” Instead, it was based on the fact that I could barely give her context to my existence as it seemed to be dispersing with the recent tide of pseudo-nativism.

And yet, I am a true Native Daughter to this land. With a beginning that stretches back before ships docked in the ports of NYC, railroads, even creaky wooden vessels weaving across the Atlantic ceased with the tinge of persecution.  I have always been here. I have always been invisible. My story and the story of my people always seems to be running parallel to the lessons in history books, like the frayed spine of a dusty relic of the past.  To run your hand across it briefly, even for a minute, they call it “woke”.

I have found myself at the age, race, and gender where I can walk into a room and be largely ignored for large swaths of time. I have little importance politically, socially, and economically. And yet, it can sometimes be my superpower. To be in the “Upside Down” of society is an interesting experience. To delve in warped perceptions and try with all your might to will yourself up, only to realize that you are feeling the flattened weight of the top-side of a box that you have been placed in, is a very real thing.

I now make it a point to inhabit this space.  Sometimes knowing that the outside world has changed in time, whittled away to a stub, and all that remains on most days, is that box that I help to illuminate.   

I am a daughter of my Ancestors, who also once inhabited the outside world.  They built cities and drove innovation from the ground that they came from.  They crossed seas and became forged in the land of red, feet bound while fomenting the change through the chains of their kinetic bind together.

They also established realms of their own.  Each one in their boxes, they learned to fly to new Heights and depths of the unknown.  They left in their wake a world painted with brick, stone, running at its own heightened pace in a whirr.  A technological hum that surpasses our own evolution.  This is the creativity and drive that pulses through my blood with every heartbeat.

And yet, like my people, I remain unseen, unfathomed—a ghost passing through the gaze of a world that refuses to recognize. Their presence on this land is dismissed, their achievements buried beneath the weight of willful ignorance. How do I, standing here today, explain my origins when their stories are silenced—burned, locked away, erased from collective memory? Worse still, reduced to faint whispers in forgotten corners of consciousness, barely a shadow of recall—a flicker of recognition snuffed out by the death of a dream. How can I define who I am when there is a deliberate effort to erase who they were?

 

I will continue to shine my light in this box that I inhabit.  I will cultivate my energy to transcend new heights, being exponentially invisible in my countenance, and reverberate through the wind, like my Ancestors.  I do this all the while the pace of the Outside world metastasizes, minds being changed overnight to believe that we were never even here, that we had no significance. A whisper in the night as I write with fervor to preserve my endurance …while the words begin to fade with every stroke.