44
Another trip around the sun for a man who almost missed the trip twice.
Surviving The Times Nas
I am glad to be here. I survived what a lot of my people survive coming up out of the inner city, and I am not saying that for sympathy. I am saying it for the record.
We can talk about the statistics of being born to a sixteen year old. We can talk about the life expectancy of males from my community. I can look to my grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents and arrive at people held against their will, inside a world drawn up by men who are dust now, and we are still running their blueprints blind. We can talk about the brilliant minds cut short. The genius denied because the opportunity was never coming. We can talk about the ones that pushed through anyway. On my birthday we can talk about all of them. Another trip around the sun. The mortality of it all.
This last trip tried me. Career. Money. Health. Did I mention I almost died twice in the last twelve months. Did I mention I had a near death experience. Did I mention I have a lot of living to do before I die and I ain’t got time to waste.
And that right there is the Western thinking. Rushing to the finish line. I have been about this African cosmology, wet seasons and dry seasons, and I have been slowing my ass down. Focusing on me instead of some obtuse idea of manifesting. My creativity, my mind, my focus, all of it is moving like a kamikaze right now. Everything committed. Nothing saved for the trip back. I am learning so much about myself.
I told myself I was not going to write about grief today. I want to write about this number.
Forty four. The numerology people call it a master number. The Master Builder. Hard work, stability, foundations that hold. In Hebrew, the letters that add up to forty four spell blood and they spell child. Dam and Yeled. Blood and child. Covenant and inheritance. And this one stopped me cold: A440. Four hundred forty hertz is the pitch a whole orchestra tunes to. Every instrument in the hall finds itself against that one note before any music starts.
They say forty four is the year the building phase ends. That whatever you spent your life framing up is supposed to hold now without your hands gripping it. I have a stent holding an artery open. I know something about structure that holds. I know exactly what it costs to find out whether the building stands.
The summer months are hard for me. A couple years back I spent an entire summer out of Detroit. San Diego broke the summer curse. My fortieth at the beach with family and friends. Shout out to my cousin Tommie for making forty special out there. Shout out to my friend Rekha too.
Anyway. Back to my brother, and the dream I had.
Since his passing in 2008, my brother had always come to me in dreams as a child. Fourteen years of him showing up little. Then that summer he came grown. A man. I got to see my brother as a man. We were on a mission together, the two of us. I could not tell you now what the mission was, only that it needed both of us, and the dream felt vivid and real, like the last scene of Inception. And then he died. He died and the death was so matter of fact it was like I could not save him. Like it had already happened somewhere and the dream was only showing me the record. And when I woke up the grief was gone. The residual of it. The part I had been carrying since 2008. Gone.
I have had so many sleeps since 2008. That is how I count it now, not in years, in sleeps. And in one of them my brother came grown and let me wake up lighter. I do not know how the chemical process changed me or my life but I’m for sure it changed. Grief is an interesting thing. It is an interesting process. It is an interesting state of mind to be in, and and it never leaves. It stays. The residual is gone and the grief is not. Four summers now and it has not come back, and still I can put my hand on the grief any hour I want and it is warm. what does that say about me. what does it say that fourteen years could leave in one sleep and the rest stays close enough to reach.
That morning I wrote one sentence down.
Everything matters, but not everything matters to everyone.
People ask where the quote came from. It came from that morning. My brother mattered enough to rearrange my whole life, and to the world his death was matter of fact. Both things are true and I have been living in the distance between them ever since. Three years after that dream, the same sentence sat with me in a hospital bed. This publication carries it now, and this publication, like my work behind the camera, was never about photography.
Forty four. Blood and child. The note the orchestra tunes to. The year the builder gets to sit inside what he built. I do not know what this year does with a man who set the residual down and kept the reaching. I will find out one sleep at a time.
Happy birthday to this Cancer Leo cusp son that goes by the name Terrell Groggins.
Keep The Light Alive
If you have read this far, you already know what kind of work this is. It answers to the truth, not to power. It survives because people who understand its purpose decide it is worth keeping alive. Not through clicks. Through commitment.
A contribution is not charity. It is fuel. It covers the miles. It keeps the lights on when the work asks for more than sleep. It pays for the travel, the public records requests, the equipment that breaks at the worst possible moment, and the nights spent rewriting a sentence until it finally tells the truth without flinching.
It is a way of saying: keep going. We see what you are building.
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Even one cup keeps the archive lit.
Every act of support is another flash in the dark
The line about counting grief not in years but in sleeps stayed with me. There’s something deeply human in the way you describe the residual lifting while the grief itself remains warm and reachable. Happy 44th, Terrell. May this year let you live inside what you’ve built without having to hold every wall up yourself.