SOME NOTES TOWARD GOING TO OXFORD

 SOME NOTES TOWARD GOING TO OXFORD 

I leave for Oxford in three days; I have not come to the realization that I am really leaving the West side of Chicago and going to Oxford. It still seems eerie, unreal; like a scene from some thriller, some Twilight-zone, where niggas from the hood actually survive the hood. 

What is this grotesque realism I feel when I sit and think about my life before Oxford, before Wheaton, after Oxford, back at Wheaton, who will I be when I return ? How will I be?

I read stories of Black folk leaving the ghetto and going abroad and it being an experience that shatters the traditional use of the term transcendent. 

Oxford is only three days away: I will miss the sound of sirens, the hum of the L, the House music blaring at odd hours of the night, Uncle Remus, mild sauce, I will miss my friends, my family, Zury, Pooby, Shaun, I will miss Jeni’s and Mario’s and Jimmy’s, I will miss Julio, John, Ito, my granny and my old cave. 

I will leave the country, a boy, having not left the West side much, who will return? What will return? I will land in London and will I finally cry the tears I’ve been unable to conjure this entire process? Will I weep because I am afraid of everywhere being the same as home ? Or will there be tears of joy? 

And what will become of my idea of Blackness? Will that, too, change? Will I come back, someone who has clipped his tongue? Tamed his speech to survive in a foreign land? Or will my tongue be the death of me as I stand, a stranger in a strange land? 

I do not know. I want to be hopeful. I want to enjoy myself, but my existence has always been clouded in negativity.