I'll be 39 in September, and it has taken all 39 of those years to learn how to learn. I never considered myself particularly smart. I've always learned things at a fairly slow clip. But I was insanely curious, and I've learned to not panic at my slowness, at the creaking gears in my head. I've learned to live in the curiosity, to just sit there and wait. I told the waitress I'd like "une latte." I don't even know why. Probably because I am brutal with the language, and have not yet learned to dance. But I have learned to sit and wait. I have learned so much, just in the past five years. That is to say I have gone through all kinds of changes, and I think this is a luxury.

The face of Trayvon Martin is always with me, trapped in the amber of youth. What is bracing about these regular deaths is how easily I can slot myself into the same circumstance. Follow me in a Jeep, then follow me on foot and we might come to blows. Demand that I turn down my music, at 17, and you might well not like my response. And I do not think this is a fact of black magic, of pathologies, of my culture. I think it is product of 17. I ride the trains in New York and I see boys of all colors who are very loud, because they finally can be, and no one can stop them. I see them and smile, and remember my own days back in Baltimore, my first freedoms, talking shit and being out in the world.

I finished my café au lait—I believe that's what it was. I was now late, because I am still a little young, and punctuality is not yet among the changes. I hailed a cab. The cab barreled down Broadway, past the Applejack Diner, and I thought of my twenties. I used to pass this restaurant with Kenyatta. Samori was barely one. We were broke and in trouble. I remembered getting off the train for couples counseling. I remember thinking I couldn't even buy my girl breakfast. My Dad used to visit us and leave cash. I remember thinking he was insane. We were ridiculous. How privileged are we to now see the changes?

I made my train, and it is from here that I now send this kite to you. I am sitting here watching the frozen hills run by, and I am thinking of all the changes that so many black boys never see, for the death tax which their country has long levied upon them:

That we shall die, we know. 'Tis but the time,

And drawing days out, that men stand upon.

But some are given more days than others, and I think of dying at 17, in my loudness, in my vanity, which is to say in my human youth, and I tremble. I was barely anything. I understood barely anything. When Michael Dunn killed Jordan Davis, he obliterated a time-stream, devastated an open range of changes. And somewhere on that American jury, someone thought this was justice, someone believed in the voodoo of shotguns and teleportation. Michael Dunn killed a boy, and too robbed a man of his chance to be.