Today is the thirteenth anniversary of the day that Trayvon Martin was murdered...I want to take a moment to just acknowledge that and to reflect a bit.

There's a lot I could say. As you might expect, I am filled with so many emotions whenever I think about Trayvon. Anger. Sadness. Fear. But the thing that honestly keeps playing over and over through my mind is the fact that, well... I am not the same person I was on the day that Trayvon died.

I was 21 years old when he died. And in the thirteen years since, I have become someone who is practically unrecognizable from who I was then. When I look back to my life in 2012, I am honestly shocked at where I am today. And if I go back even further, to 2007--when I was 17--I see even less of the person that I have become today.

Why am I sharing any of this? Because one of the things that haunts me about the children we have lost to the hands of white supremacy and greed is the fact that we don't even know the people they would have become. We grieve them as figures that have been frozen in time, unable to see the men and women and people that they were being shaped into by their own thriving community, and individual passions, gifts and sense of purpose. They are immortalized as our teachers, warnings...prophets--but the cost for becoming our ancestors is the loss of a future that every child is supposed to be promised.

And no, I am not suggesting that it is somehow less of a tragedy when adults suffer at the hands of these immoral systems. But today I am reminded of the rivers--not drops--of blood our children have shed for daring to exist in a world that was built for someone else. And at the risk of being too vulnerable, I don't know how to really cope with that grief. Because here we are, thirteen years later, after all of our yelling, all of our shouting, all of our marching, all of their bleeding...and we have still not convinced the world that our children deserve to live.

As a Black man who is raising proud Black children... I don't know how to cope. Because Trayvon wasn't the first child who was asked to answer for the Black community's crime of wanting freedom, and I think we all know we haven't seen the last. However, that is not entirely the purpose of this article, or blog, or whatever you want to call it. I am not writing in despair. I am writing because in the midst of the fear and the grief and the pain, I do still believe in the power of hope.

That is what I want to talk about.

A friend of mine posted a status the other day that was meant to remind people that reading Parable of the Sower was never meant to steal our ability to hope. If you've read it, you know it is devastating. It is a painful reminder of just how bad these systems of oppression were designed to harm us. People often read that book, and its sequel, and leave it believing that Octavia Butler is nothing short of a prophet. But the thing is: she didn't just write that series to speak to a possible future. She wrote it with a full understanding of what America's systems of power and oppression have designed for the future. Which only serves to make her predictions--which feel terrifyingly familiar to what we are experiencing today in America--harder to sit with. But the thing is... Octavia died before she could finish her story. At the time of her death, she had only finished two of SIX planned novels. Which means that we are looking at her vision of the future and stopping before she could get to the point.

Why does that matter? Because the goal of dystopian literature isn't to terrify you. It is to expose you to horrifying truths and to force you to wrestle with them. And it is almost certain that if she had been given the chance, the wrestling her story would have forced us through would have ended in hope.

I share all of this because, well, we may not be living out the pages of a dystopian novel. But we are living through a nightmare. Our children are dying in front of us. We are watching live as fascism claws its way out of the grave and entire nations are crippled by genocide over and over and over again. All while our neighbors applaud and our civil "servants" strip us of our rights and humanity.

THIS IS HARD.

But here is what I want you to sit with... it is not too late to wrestle.

That is the goal of this community. I don't have answers for you. I can't tell you what it looks like to resist, or what it will take to overthrow what is clearly tyranny. But I can facilitate a space that challenges you to wrestle. So, whatever your reason was for joining this community, just know that our purpose here is to fight for stories that force the world to wrestle. Whether they look like our debut novel Cry, Voidbringer, or the unbelievable story we just read together in book club (The Reformatory), or some conversation that will happen organically in our community discord. Whatever it looks like, wrestling is what we are here to do. And for me, that is hope.

So yeah... I guess what I'm saying is, I am so freaking horrified by where we are as a society. BUT, I take great comfort in the knowledge that I am a part of a community that is actively fighting to change course. So buckle up. Because we have a lot of work to do.

I was going to give you a list of books to read as homework, but I think I'd rather let you take some time to digest this before we break out the reading list. Instead, I'm just going to leave you with this: You deserve hope. So don't let them steal it from you. It is ok to grieve the things they have taken from us. And it is ok to be afraid of the future they are fighting to force on us. But we cannot afford to lose hope. So, keep wrestling. Keep your eyes open and your heart focused on protecting your humanity. Because you deserve hope, my friend. And despite all of the reasons not to, I believe it is still warranted.