When No One Is Watching
A study in self-possession.
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I am the only place I’m not being evaluated.
There’s an emptiness to being exceptional. Not the hollow kind, but the spacious kind. The kind that exists when you stop performing prescribed versions of yourself. I’ve tried easier paths; their vacancy bored me. An exception isn’t something you declare. It arrives in the space between who they expect and who shows up. It emerges in others’ responses, in their confusion when you won’t perform the dance they’ve choreographed for you.
My existence provokes, even in silence. People react to context, never me. Their eyes flicker, calculating, cataloging what they can’t quite place. Like I’m a sentence in a language they recognize but can’t parse, and it bothers them that fluency isn’t enough.
Where are you from?
Who do you know?
Gold on my skin becomes a riddle they didn’t ask for but can’t ignore. They gauge worth by tone and posture, searching for the logic that would let them file me properly. The pauses between their words grow heavy. A compliment that tastes like an investigation. Or archaeology. They’re digging for something that would make me make sense. They want an origin story where they’re the protagonist, or at least essential to the plot.
I let their questions hang in the air like art they admire but don’t understand. Sometimes I answer, often I don’t. Their faces show confusion, irritation, sometimes respect. They’re unsure how to respond to someone who won’t audition for the role they’ve imagined. Mostly, they stare.
A rooftop bar under polluted skies, where smog turns beauty into accident. A dinner where people mistake proximity to power for worth. Anywhere I take up space—visually, intellectually, romantically—becomes a site of small disruptions. The world doesn’t expect it. The room was never made for me until I made my own. Most are held up by scaffolding, claiming ownership of borrowed views, not the muscle of self. I enjoy watching them perform.
I’ve been called mysterious, as if it’s intentional. As if I wake up practicing enigma in the mirror. The truth is simpler and more damning. I have interests beyond their imagination. My mind moves in directions they can’t follow. Not mysterious. Only uninterested in being legible to people who’ve never had to read between the lines.
As they evaluate, I return the favor. I feel tender watching their confusion, like someone realizing the map they’ve been following leads nowhere they actually want to go. But for a moment, they arrive at me. They don’t know what that means. Most never find out.
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My body picks up frequencies first. Before language forms, before thought arrives, energy moves through my palms. Tightness claims my jaw. Every cell remembers what misreading costs.
Each gesture reveals something. The way someone says my name, testing its weight. The laugh that stops short of their eyes. I collect these hints, each one a dot on the map between us.
Everyone wants the blueprint. How does she do it? They see polish and call it luck. See eloquence and call it charm. They mistake endurance for ease. What exhausts me, they call it effortless. (If they knew how much work it takes to look this unbothered, they’d stay asleep.)
Observation is how I rest in rooms that leave me restless. But it’s lonely work, this constant translation between worlds. The more I see, the less I’m seen. When I step outside myself to study the pattern, I split into researcher and subject, filing my own existence under “pending further investigation.”
They call it composure. I call it choreography. Every calm response is a calculation of which truths get stage time and which dissolve into the archive of the unsaid. I map the room’s invisible hierarchies: who interrupts, who waits, who assumes space is their birthright. Who bows to whom. I bow to none, which apparently is its own kind of problem.
Sometimes I wonder if this vigilance is just a sophisticated form of dissociation; precision dressed up as peace. But then someone misreads me again, calls me intimidating when I was literally trying to remember if I have almond milk at home, and I remember why the armor stays on.
My calm isn’t the absence of feeling. It’s architecture. I choose which responses live and which dissolve before they reach my face. The ones that die don’t disappear. I carry them home as seeds that might grow in different soil.
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At home, I return to the body. Not the one they see, but the one I inhabit. The quiet doesn’t want anything from me. It just receives.
I write in bed with my G2 gel pen, light dimmed until words become texture more than text. My reflection floats in the window, finally just surface, not symbol. Music drifts in the air, Laraaji, when I need to feel expansive. King Krule, when I need to feel everything. Sakamoto, when I need to feel nothing at all. Timer set for ten minutes. Time always wins, but I play anyway.
In the morning, birds gather on my balcony, announcing morning without permission. Trash trucks on Wednesdays keep time. Life stirs, not performing, just being. Evening brings engines and voices, dogs and distance. The city moves around me, but can’t reach me. I love being alone but not isolated, hearing life happen without having to prove I’m part of it.
Sometimes I write in the living room, feet pressed to cool travertine, the only thing in my space that stays at a constant temperature. Walls are bare because I need blankness to bounce thoughts against. Oslo watches with the patience of love before language, which might be the only kind that doesn’t lie. He knows who I am at 3 am and 3 pm and loves both. Revolutionary.
When I write, everything I’ve swallowed resurfaces. Not beautifully. The mess is holy. My fingers cramp holding thoughts too large for my hands. I misspell everything. Abandon punctuation like religion I’ve outgrown. Urgency matters more than order. Start at point A and trust the line to curve toward truth.
My shoulders drop from their performing positions. The cage opens just enough to breathe. From watched to watching to witnessed, but only by myself.
The world continues. Arguments and declarations. Sirens and serenades. But it can’t colonize this hour. Not because I’ve locked it out, but because I’ve stopped translating myself for its approval.
People assign weight to my words, gravity to my presence. Even alone, I feel the pressure of their projections. (Do they think I don’t notice? That I exist this way by accident? That intelligence is something that happens to me instead of through me?) A pen weighs almost nothing. My laptop, barely more. The heaviest things I carry have no mass at all.
I return to myself. Unmeasured, untranslated, intact. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and wear the world again. The watching. The being watched. The careful choreography of existing while Black, while woman, while me.
But tonight, I’m just a woman writing in the dark, finally light enough to breathe.
This is beautiful, thank you for sharing
I adore this Emma 🩷 in my teen years all I ever heard was I wasn’t ’black enough’ due to the love of my niche interests. We are who we are and that’s all that matters.