“Really, right now. I just want to figure out how to Love myself. That’s all I’m focused on. I don’t know how to get there but I’m willing to walk the walk. That’s why when I saw the link to join the Wequilibrium Family, I knew that I had to be here, like I said, I knew this was going to be my home.”
Nervous energy coursed through Marvin’s body, and he got up and released a bit of it by opening the sliding door and letting in some fresh air and taking a few deep breaths. “I feel like before, like the Old World was a dream and this is the real world but before, before wasn’t a dream to me. Do ya get what I’m saying? The fucked-up world before was my reality, but it was all a dream.”
Lee added, “It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine. Salt and Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine.” The two laughed at the smooth reference and the spot-on Biggie impersonation.
Adding a more somber tone to the conversation, Lee said, “I understand. I can say now that I understand what you’re feeling, and now, I can empathize with you in ways I never could have before The Shift. It’s like when I was non-melanated, I would have said, ‘Yes, I completely understand, I agree.’ and I not only wouldn’t have understood, but I woulda been thinking and planning and projecting what you were going to say in advance, and thinking and planning what I was going to say, all so that I could say something that I delusionally thought that you would have wanted to hear. I wouldn’t have heard or even cared about what you were saying. I would have said nothing of substance. I was so shallow and empty. I had no reference or respect for anything to do with the experience of being Black. I had a total of zero Black friends in my real life. Black people meant nothing to me, nothing at all, other than what they could do to get my rocks off. Not the Black men I serviced, not the Black women I swore my devotion to.”
“I wouldn’t even have been able to quote Biggie or any other Black artist before The Shift; I half-way listened to whatever was on the radio in my car and music didn’t move me or touch me the way it does now. Now, I feel the SOUL of music, I feel the groove and it’s opened my consciousness in ways that were just empty, dark places before.”
Marvin had to take a minute to let all that sink in.
Settling down on the sofa again and intentionally moving closer so he could face Lee, Marvin requested, “Please, go on. Don’t skip anything. I wanna hear everything. I mean, how’d you feel after The Shift and how did you get from the guy in the picture to the man sitting in front of me in two short years? That seems miraculous to me.”
“Everything that we are experiencing is miraculous. Time isn’t the same as it was before The Shift. What is two years on the calendar now is not the same for me as it was before, and even my experience of time is different than what yours has been in the last two years. The more I show gratitude and appreciation for life, the more I release the old programming, the more I learn to Love, the more time slows. There’s still so much I don’t understand and I’m still healing and growing and learning but that’s the beauty of this New World. I love feeling pride and accomplishment in my growth and healing because I KNOW that I don’t have to be doing any of this. And trust me when I tell you, this shit has been HARD.”
“We are all going to learn and grow and heal together. During this phase of Truth and Reconciliation, we are going to come to terms with the lies we were told, we are going to evolve and heal while releasing the hold the fear had over us as we move to Love. We are all going to go from unaware and separated to One, from believing that we are individuals to experiencing life as united. Our destination is all the same but the journeys we take to get there are our own to navigate. There will come a day in the future when all of humanity unites our focus, our consciousness, and our love to create The Shift, the Shift that we experienced in the past. That shit trips me out.”
Marvin reached for another joint and Lee lit it for him. He needed it to help him expand his consciousness.
“I met Scottie back in 2020, during quarantine, on Nite Flirt, the phone sex line. Man, that seems like a lifetime ago.” He took a few puffs of the joint Marvin shared with him and took a few seconds to reflect on that sensation. Appreciating how far he had come was one of the true gifts this New World provided him. “When I tell you that I was an asshole, I mean I was an asssssshole. I was so caught up in lies and pretense. I lied about everything. I spent an endless amount of time denying how dark my thoughts and fantasies really were. Mostly because I thought that if I acknowledged them, I would become out of control. Shit, I was already out of fucking control. But I was convinced that denial and lying were my safeguards when the more I suppressed my own truth, the more it owned me in the darkest hours.”
“With Scottie, I would fuck up, I would always say something or do something stupid and rather than owning up to it and apologizing, I would always project this sense of not being enough, not being good enough for her, and I would fill my mind with things I thought she felt about me and I would run away. Then, I would feel this draw and come back. I did it too many times to count.”
“And Scottie would always take me back, teach me, show me my whiteness. I hated her for it. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, not in that way, but she always made me feel inferior with her inherent superiority and intellect and her ability to know me better than I knew myself. She knew when I was lying, she knew my motivations and my core beliefs better than me. And she was so comfortable in her own skin; and she just felt so much smarter than me. That white male part of me hated her for that. But I was drawn to her like a moth to a flame burned by the fire.”
Without missing a beat, Marvin said, “my Love is blind, can’t you see my desire.”
Lee poked fun at him, “Yeah, don’t be too proud of yourself. I set that one up for you.”
“Around March of 2023, she started talking about a shift. If I’m being completely honest, even up until the last second, and I can be honest now in ways I couldn’t have been before or after The Shift, I didn’t think for a second that there was any way in hell that she was more powerful than whiteness. I had put my money on whiteness.”
Marvin stopped him. “Wait! I don’t understand. What do you mean you had put your money on whiteness?”
“OK, let me try again. I was one of the many white men who had a foot in both worlds. I can say that I was probably one of the only people, well, one of the only white men in the 3D who knew what The Shift was going to be like before it happened. Linearly, we all knew that a shift was supposed to happen but the assumption in the other realms, what is understood now to be the dark realms, was that the One who had come to free the world was going to choose fear, not Love, because that’s all whiteness was capable of understanding, because fear and pain had been beaten into Black consciousness.”