Part I : mahpiohanzia

|| the bitter//sweet project || chapter two: free//fall

Runway

Before this bitter//sweet project was anything more than a loose collection of scribbled-down ideas, those beginning dregs of thoughts found home in this piece. It only assumed true essay form while I was reading “A Little Devil in America” by Hanif Abdurraqib in March of 2025. I was inspired by the languid stretch of his long, unfurling sentences, finding a certain freedom in their breathless pace. The way they resembled vine growth, stretching endlessly and with purpose across the page, always reaching for some crucial point of illumination.

I frequently feel constrained by punctuation when I am attempting to roll out the endless carpet of thoughts that whirl about my mind moment to moment. When writing passionately, I feel my fingers trip over themselves the same way I often do my tongue when explaining some urgent idea or opinion.

In many ways, the feeling of Blackness matches up with this feeling of breathlessness: in the gasping passion of music and ritual and worship. In the discussions I have with my sister about the world we live in, trading stories of hope and heartache, giving no pause between breaths, too much to say about a world that refuses to hear us. In the tight chest-pinch of pain when I come across the news of some Black death, some land reaped, some community exterminated, exiled, imprisoned, swallowed whole by the beast, our bodies mastering the grieving process to a few deep breaths.

Every year, I crave air more urgently, recognizing it is not an endless resource, and that something might be asked of me to maintain it. That air is part of the earth, not above it.

This connection was highlighted in the introduction of Beronda Montgomery’s book “When Trees Testify,” as she discussed the relationship between her family and the trees of her childhood home, saying, “ I didn’t in that moment make the connection that the tree held not only their childhood memories but their captured breath in the form of the wood making up the massive tree trunks.” (Montgomery). It is important to remember that every being is a convergence of universes, a chain of reactions that perpetually alter each other, calling one to maintain one’s surroundings in order to maintain self.

Since moving to Colorado and living right across from a park, I have found myself choked by pollen, Spring after Spring: sneezing and gasping, huffing and holding my breath, and whatever other tricks I tried over the years to unblock my airways. I have grown so accustomed to it that I sometimes don’t even notice when my breath begins to wheeze its way in and out, or when I start having to open my mouth for imperceptible gasps throughout the day. Some days I take deep, filling breaths, and I’m struck by how, through the necessity of pushing through work days and tasks, I often resign myself to not breathing, giving it up little by little without realizing it.

In just the past few years, the AI arms race has become the center of nearly every industry, with companies advertising AI services at the forefront of their businesses, and countless people being replaced by AI programs in the name of “cost-efficiency.”

Around the time I began this piece in 2025, a Politico article was released discussing how Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI has been polluting the city of Memphis, saying “In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides.”

Historically, the geography of cities in America has been organized to place poor, often predominantly black neighborhoods in the path of the worst refuse of humanity. These communities are bisected by highways and isolated, placed downwind of smog-belching factories, and downstream of chemical leaks.

If public outrage grows enough, there is perhaps a chance that the people of Memphis can push for stricter regulations and probably some monetary compensation. But even these are small concessions for a billionaire like Elon Musk to make, and one that would only come after a lengthy court case. All the while, life moves on, people adjust to not breathing, move away, or perish, as we gradually forget their stolen breath.

In the time since, numerous other AI data centers have been opened or announced to be coming soon, even though these health concerns have only grown.

As a Black man, I find myself running into the question again and again: who has the right to air and all of its magic?

Flight is a major motif in Black life and literature, often indicating some form of escape or freedom. Flight/freedom occupies a sacred axiological space in Black history and culture, frequently representing a guiding principle or prime goal, either spiritually and physically. With this veneration for freedom, there is also an understanding that it can only be achieved and maintained through sacrifice.

The myriad ways that Blackness achieves flight/freedom span a spectrum greater than the colors hiding between the folds of the rainbow, most of the evidence buried by nature and necessity. In ringshouts and cookouts, cliff notes and blue notes, street graffiti and jazz soliloquies.

Sometimes even in death or fugitivity, or some radical expression of both. I think of the myth of the Flying African, a collection of beliefs passed through the African captives brought to the Americas in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, that their souls would fly back to their homeland after death. In America, where Black bodies have historically represented product, owned by another, death becomes inherently fugitive.

This is expressed in the history of insurance companies and the careful valuation of our bodies. I think of the Zong massacre in 1781, each extinguished life reduced to a series of numbers that could be evidenced as profit. The fact that Haiti is still in debt to France for the loss of their slave “property” when they liberated themselves in 1791. I think of how liberation is yet another form of flight.

The longer I stare at its shape, the more these different avenues of flight continue to reveal themselves to me, blending and blurring my understanding of the word and its possibilities, because how could it be flight if it wasn’t mercurial?

I have found that the moments I have ever come close to actually flying, I was consumed with terror. That flight requires leaving behind some part of you that the world holds hostage to keep you in place, inciting change and transformation. It means reaching new heights, and there’s always a cost.

Take Off

Education, in its role as another method of self-empowerment and even self-liberation, represents another dimension of flight.

For this reason, it is also a critical and emphasized tenet of any successful Black liberation movement. The ability to decipher the language of the world that surrounds you is critical to one’s ability to move through it.

The importance of education in Black liberation means that it has always been a very contentious space for us to exist within. If you are a Black person in academics, you will repeatedly run into reminders of how the founders and heralded pioneers in every field would’ve felt about you. Learn how many have found inspiration and dedicated years of their lives to their studies to justify a lesser place in the world for you.

During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, it was illegal for most slaves to learn how to read, carrying harsh punishments ranging from maiming and torture, to death. Numerous great Black figures born into slavery are lauded for their perseverance and bravery for learning how to read and write despite these threats, such as Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass.

The stories they were later able to tell as a result of their literacy were critical at different junctures in showing the world the reality of the Black and African-American experience.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, Freedom Schools were established and run in secret in order to teach Black people critical skills like reading and writing, which they were barred from learning.

This is all before we get into discussions about Brown v. Board, white flight, school-to-prison pipelines, or affirmative action and its reactions. The American education system is shaped by its efforts to exclude Black people, and Black efforts to circumvent these barriers, in the same way its service industry still carries the practice of tipping as a lingering vestige of slavery.

As a voracious reader, I often think of all the things in my life that would be left empty without my ability to read and write. My windows into other experiences, my access to information, the ancestors it allows me to listen to commune with, my ability to communicate my thoughts to others, to myself, just giving me space to breathe.

In August of 2017, I flew to Howard University to start my freshman year of college. College was a concept that I struggled to grasp right up to the day that I checked into my dorm. Aside from a brief six months at McMeen Elementary School in the second grade, I was homeschooled until the 6th grade, when I attended an online school called K12 until I started high school. As a result of this upbringing, the idea of paying thousands of dollars to attend a school, or that these schools may help pay their exorbitant costs if I did well on this or that test, seemed arbitrary and alien to me.

I remember taking the PSAT both in California in 9th grade and later in Georgia in the 10th, and being baffled as to what any of it meant. Talking to my peers, it seemed everyone had a different idea of what college would mean for them. In it, some saw freedom from the 12-year purgatory of early education, while others saw it as a continuation. Some kids thought of it as their rightful inheritance, and others as a curse.

Some kids suffered breakdowns leading up to just the practice test, while others haphazardly marked bubbles (what I learned was colloquially known as “Christmas Treeing it” after the way one decorates the baubles across the tree’s surface). Teachers and counselors stressed the importance of the test and the institutions it was preparing us for, and we all nodded, some agreeing and others merely caught up in the motion or tradition, but ultimately, none of us understood what was being asked of us. All we shared was our fear and excitement of the unknown, and even that we didn’t understand.

My parents always stressed the importance of knowledge and self-development, but they always maintained that this wasn’t inherently tied to school or grades. This didn’t mean that academics didn’t matter, but rather that we didn’t regard academic institutions as the arbiters of assessing our self-worth. This isn’t to say that education is a scam, but certainly the systems built around it exist atop legacies of exploitation and exclusion of people like me, and to forget that could be fatal.

What I did hear about college in my youth was often in connection with Howard University, an HBCU (Historically Black College or University), and also where my parents met each other. I may have to write a story about that one day because they are a true 90’s Love Jones type meeting– a revolutionary Panther Cub, and a Campus Pal Cheerleader from California. As a kid, though, all I knew was that it was the school where my parents found each other and themselves, and so in 2017, I hopped on a plane to fulfill my leg of the legacy.

Even my trip itself was marked by my Blackness, it felt, requiring a familiar balance of patience, creativity, and faith. When you talk to alumni from Howard, they will tell you that, more than academics, attending Howard prepares Black people for the difficulties they will experience out in the world.

The whole process of negotiating with Howard’s housing and financial office, navigating the various archaic, sometimes even deceased, webpages, calling the outdated contacts they provided, and ping-ponging between departments was a nightmare that I struggled with until the moment I walked into my dorm room and set my bags on the floor.

When I set out, there was still so much pending. I didn’t even know if I had a room secured, or if I would be allowed to stay due to a medical hold that I had on my account at the time. With these and many more unknowns, I was nervous and hesitant to even fly in at the start of the semester, but also didn’t want to miss anything or mess up the first leg of this new journey.

The first step of flight is the leap of faith, and this, too, I have found, is integral to the Black experience. When I shared my concerns about taking the flight with my father, a devoted acolyte of this tradition, he told me, “Take the flight, you’ll figure it out with them once you get there,” and so off I flew.

I had a backpack, a trunk, and a suitcase with me, and found out that I would be flying to D.C., getting to Howard, and checking into my dorm all by myself. I can say definitively now that had this been the actual case, I don’t know how I would have made it. As life would have it, sharing this flight with me was this kid whom I had just made friends with in the summer leading up to college.

Peter is now one of my best friends, and among those that I have kept for the longest time, but at this time, we had mostly been friends as a result of proximity. He’d heard I was planning to go to Howard and that my father was an alum, and he immediately set to networking and planning how he could do it himself. He was loud, energetic, and confident, a boulder of strength and endless momentum, and once he set his sights on Howard, my carefully cultivated bubble of solitude was just another hurdle to glide over to achieve that goal.

He had been messaging me in the months leading up to the start of the semester, trying to coordinate our flights together, but since I was so unsure of my plans, I told him to buy his ticket without me.

Despite buying my ticket the night before flying, we ended up on the same flight. I can still recall the look of astonishment on his face when he saw me walk on the plane, most likely a mirror of my own. Part wonderment, and part confusion, as all the best blessings are, for neither of us knew just how much we would need each other.

He was also flying by himself, and he had three suitcases with him. We shared an Uber to Drew Hall, where we discovered the breadth of our lack of preparation. People of all ages cluttered all around the dormitory, the whole building vibrating with life like an ant hill.

Cars and baggage dollies lined the street, parents and relatives helping their kids with everything from fighting to secure available dollies, loading them with their baggage, helping push through the thronging mass of people, to completing the endless stream of paperwork, filling out various waivers and release forms that were spread across the dormitory like a scavenger hunt.

It was in this moment that Peter and I decided to become family for each other, a tradition that would become crucial for our time there and beyond. My bag and trunk and his three bags became our five pieces of luggage, as we helped each other across each checkpoint: unloading our bags from the Uber, one standing with the luggage while the other grabbed dollies, one deciphering the campus map and conflicting directions we were given to the check-in table, elevators, sign-in desk, and eventually our rooms.

Our college experiences embodied the full sensation of flying: the falling and the soaring: the terror and the euphoria.

First Flight

During my first week of college, I flew for the first time in my life. Freshman week occurs before the official start of the semester as a way to acclimate incoming freshmen to college life and get them excited for the semester. As such, it was structured around a number of social events organized around the campus. Nestled at the tail-end of summer, it is also a time of year that is often visited by storms that come and go with the speed and force of a lightning strike.

I experienced one such storm for the first time while attending one of these random Freshman week social events hosted in The Yard, a large communal courtyard located at the heart of Howard University. I was playing a card game in a large tent with some kids I had just run into when climbing windspeeds and drifting petrichor let us know that rain was on its way.

Always one to prepare, I decided to grab my jacket from my dorm so I wouldn’t be stuck in the rain when I felt like leaving. The entire walk to the dorm, I was surprised by the force of the winds as it sloughed against me with the force of a landslide. I had to actively tilt my body forward to march my way through it and briefly considered staying in once I made it to my dorm. Ultimately, my FOMO won out, and I wrapped my coat tightly around myself before heading back out.

Halfway through my walk back from the dorm, as I took one particularly determined step, nervously chuckling at my own seriousness to downplay the real fear I felt at my lack of control, a gust of wind halted my foot mid-step, feeling for a moment as if I had discovered an invisible stair, before the pocket of wind expanded, buffeting beneath wings I didn’t realize I had outstretched, that I had only in this moment discovered I possessed, and I felt myself pulled towards the swirling heavens.

I was yanked off my feet, and briefly, I was weightless. I didn’t feel like Superman taking off. It was sudden and physical, a wrenching of my person from what I understood to be possible, from the earth that had held me my whole life, in every way one could imagine. It reminded me of the fearful awe in gospel music– knowing the price of flight and that it rarely feels like flying.

Later, I would learn that my mother never even graduated from Howard, and later than that, I would learn that neither did Ta-Nehisi Coates, a major contemporary Black scholar and one who inspired many of my class to attend Howard University with his book “Between the World and Me.”

Some days, I come across my “Howard University” T-shirt that I got right before I flew out there and remember that I didn’t graduate from there either, but most days, I can’t feel the difference. Other days, I think of all the kids that were pushed out by false promises and financial mismanagement, or unfair housing requirements, or any of the other issues that led to the nine-day sit-in of Howard’s administrative and financial aid office in March of 2018.

I remember spending a night in there myself, one of the many students who may or may not have been losing housing, university jobs, financial aid, a place to stay, their way out of the system. Some of the kids had come to Howard University for this very reason! To dismantle the system, and they were eager to test their strategies.

The organizers went through protocol in case the police would try to come in during the nighttime, something the administration had been threatening. There was fear, but there was also a strange sense of peace. The floors were covered in blankets and sleeping bags, some kids sneaking off to dark corners while others hosted card games loud enough to draw the whole hallway to crowd around. These moments of connection will always be Howard University for me, the taste and texture that lift from the memories when I trace them.

In a certain sense, I felt that I was back in the PSAT test room, in a room of peers all brought there from different walks of life and positions, but here nonetheless, facing the education system once more. Perhaps it should have felt different, but in a way, it was truer. We were all still struggling against that yawning oblivion that society threatens those who fall outside the system, or beneath its wheels

Reference Page

Montgomery, Beronda L. When Trees Testify: Science, Wisdom, History, and America’s Black Botanical Legacy. Henry Holt & Company, 2026.

Wittenberg, Ariel. “‘How Come I Can’t Breathe?’: Musk’s Data Company Draws a Backlash in Memphis - Politico.” Politico, 6 May 2025, www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582.

[Originlly posted June 7th, 2026]