How Come You No Hello Me When You Know Me So Well

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How Come You No Hello Me When You Know Me So Well Nicole Hamer (bio) The day after George Floyd is kneeled on to death, neglected to death, viewed like internet pornography to death, like so many episodes of Black Mirror, the country finally realizes Black lives skip to a story loop. The deaths keep rolling through: graduations, picnics with coleslaw and the right potato salad, bedtime self-care routines, drives to a neighborhood store to score Tums, jogs down your street, inhaling air while outside or inside or staring sideways or while taking in a horizon bursting with pastel colors or gazing upward at a sedate blue sky acting as support cast for a white cloud main event. Keep on keeping on, the Black story loop keeps shuffling like those clouds. In between, we experience joy and beauty, and then reality gets caught and someone Black dies in an insidious manner, and we begin our lives anew: we read a few books, we hand gesture outrage over a latte or wine or Genesee Cream Ale. There are shirts to be worn with clever phrases that show our sensitivity to an issue, we try to hear people, really hear them (really is it a volume issue?), and arrange to be present at their anger venting sessions, and we march in the streets and realize we are all melting. Then sometime in the near future, we return to before times, or we remember our limitless well of outrage is depleted and we don’t have the strength to continue daily [End Page 87] outrage because that Netflix show won’t watch itself, and I play chess and it really speaks to me, so the loop continues and we feel the pain releasing through us like guilt, but we don’t release it like we once did, and our Black friends see us on Zoom and we pass through a great unease, but we wear our catchy black T-shirts with catchy phrases printed in white text and talk change and notice the time and Queen’s Gambit is on and gotta go. So the loop begins again, but I’m woke, with a small w and woke is the ultimate goal in some ways, isn’t it? And the world continues on the ultimate Black lives loop because that’s all it’s got time for and that’s all it can be because that seems all we can be, because someone else has to break her back cleaning up the world, Stacey Abrams is Queen. But we’ll provide the must try cheeses and so yes, our outrage is real. It just doesn’t last long, but didn’t you see my Instagram? It’s outraged! And then you think, isn’t a loop also a noose? [End Page 88] Nicole Hamer Nicole Hamer is a writer and photographer whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming in BITCH Magazine, GOOD Magazine, WBUR Arts & Culture, River Teeth, Hobart, and Foliate, among other publications. Her play, Clark and Kent, was performed on stage in Chicago. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and has taught nonfiction writing at the undergraduate level. Nicole worked as a freelance writer and photographer in the Middle East. She has also worked in finance and publishing and produced independent documentaries for radio. She once threw a woman’s luggage off a train in the South of France, then lived to tell the story on stage for NPR affiliate NEPM’s Valley Voices. She is currently working on a book about Traveling Abroad While Black and a short documentary about James Baldwin’s time spent in a Parisian jail. Copyright © 2022 River Teeth