Dear God,

Why did you make me Black?

Was it a punishment?
A dare?
A lesson?
A crown I didn’t know how to wear? A cosmic lesson carved into skin.

Was my skin forged from stardust and struggle,
stitched from cotton fields and constellations?
Was I carved from the oak tree where names were hung,
but roots ran deeper still?

Did you place a sun in my chest and expect me not to burn?
Did you tuck thunder in my throat and ask me to sing lullabies?

Was I your way of showing the world what resilience looks like in slow motion?
Was I born of thunder and molasses—
meant to move through fire,
but do it gracefully?

You dyed me in the color of first light—
rich as soil,
deep as night,
loud in a world that prefers silence with its comfort.
You gave me a body that commands attention
and a history they try to bury beneath textbooks and apologies.

And then you watched them fear me
before they ever knew me.

Was that your plan?
To let me taste honey and vinegar in the same breath?
To let me be a king without a kingdom,
a drum without a parade?

You made me Black and gave no manual.
No balm for the burning.
No translation for the rage.

Just skin that sings like a spiritual
and bleeds like prophecy.

And why… why did you make me gay?

Was I your private riddle?
The hush in a Sunday sanctuary,
the skipped verse in a family prayer?
Was I the wine spilled on white linen —
too sacred to scrub out, too shameful to display?

I asked you in whispers, in screams, in the silence of my shower,
chest heaving with shame,
God — was I your slip of the pen?
Or your signature?

Was I born to be loved or merely endured?

Was I your secret kept in plain sight?
An echo of your own contradiction?
A divine blueprint too fluid for the binaries men built in your name?

Was I your poem in motion—
a line you scribbled on purpose,
and then handed to the world to misread?

You gave me desire like a second spine—
something I couldn’t shake
even when I tried to stand straight.

You made love feel like a guilty hymn.
You turned my reflection into a battleground.
You made my silence sound like survival.

Why give me a heart that blooms toward what they call deviant
and then tell me to be holy?

Why shape me in beauty
then shame me for wanting to be seen?

Why make me a melody
and place me in a church that hates the sound?

I carried these questions like bricks in my backpack,
through locker rooms and bedrooms and pulpits and poems.
Each “faggot” thrown was a stone tossed at your canvas —
and I kept asking:
Why did you paint me this way?

Why the soft voice?
Why the tight walk?
Why the longing for eyes that mirrored mine?

You knew what this world would do.
You knew what they’d call me, how they’d treat me,
how I’d bury pieces of myself in graves too shallow to keep secrets.

You knew…
how I’d consider ending it —
quietly.
At home.
Alone.

Because silence screamed.
Because loneliness felt like a life sentence with no parole.
Because if You weren’t going to answer,
maybe I’d stop asking.

I used to think these questions were sinful. That asking them meant I didn’t trust you.
Now I realize that not asking them was killing me.

Because if I don’t ask you, God, then who?

If I can’t bring the rawest parts of me to the One who supposedly made me—
then what’s the point?

I didn’t grow up believing you loved me.
I grew up believing you tolerated me—barely.

Loved was something reserved for the obedient.
For the straight-backed.
For the ones who didn’t ask so many questions
or feel so much.

I learned early that curiosity was dangerous.
That questions made adults uncomfortable.
That certainty was praised even when it was hollow.

So I learned how to perform belief.
I memorized the choreography.
Hands raised.
Eyes closed.
Voice lowered at the right moments.

But none of it reached the place where I was actually hurting.

Because belief—real belief—doesn’t live in the mouth.
It lives in the body.
And my body was always tense around you.

I was afraid of you.

Afraid that if I told you the truth,
you would agree with them.
That you would confirm what the world already implied:
that I was a mistake with good manners.

I tried to bargain with you.

I said: I’ll be good.
I said: I’ll wait.
I said: I’ll fix this part of me if you just let the rest survive.

I said: I’ll be quiet.

And silence answered.

Years of it.

Silence so thick it felt intentional.
Like neglect dressed up as mystery.

That’s when the loneliness got loud.

Not dramatic loud.
Not cinematic.

Domestic loud.
Hallway-at-night loud.
After-school loud.
The kind of loud that creeps in because no one is watching.

I wanted it to end.
Not because I hated life—
but because it felt like life hated me first.

The loneliness was a presence.
It had breath.
It sat beside me in the dark and told me I didn’t matter.
That nobody was coming.
That being different meant being disposable.

And I almost listened.
I almost made a permanent decision
to solve a temporary ache.

But something held me.

Not scripture.
Not church.
Not the thin smile of a pastor who wouldn’t look me in the eye
when he preached about abomination.

What held me was quieter.
Fiercer.
It sounded like my own breath refusing to stop.

That was you, wasn’t it?
Not the version of you they sold me—
white robe, judgmental glare, conditional welcome.

No.
You were the pulse that said: Not yet.

You were the whisper that said: Stay.

You were the infinite tucked inside my finite.

And still—
I’m not here to thank you yet.

I’m still mad.

Mad that you gave me all this awareness without a manual.
Mad that I had to piece together divinity
from the rubble of dogma and rejection.
Mad that I had to learn to love myself
by first surviving everyone who didn’t.

What kind of God makes a child
and then lets the world shame him
for how he shines?

What kind of God lets the very thing you put in me
become the reason I’m cast out?

I want to believe there’s purpose in all this.

I want to believe you made me Black
so I could remember my royalty.

That you made me gay
so I would learn to love without a script.

That you made me soft
so I could become strong without cruelty.

That you made me, me
because nothing else would do.

But belief is not easy.
It’s not a Sunday altar call.
It’s not a gospel song in the right key.

It’s a bruised, bloodied, brilliant thing.
It’s waking up every day
and deciding to keep breathing in a world that still sees you as an error code.

It’s redefining holiness
as wholeness.

It’s rewriting scripture in the margins of my own life
until it finally reads true.

I didn’t know then that nothing was broken.

I stayed alive because something in me refused to disappear.
Even when I didn’t have the language for hope,
something held me.
Not a doctrine.
Not a verse.
Not a man behind a pulpit.

Something quieter.
Something deeper.
Something that felt like me.

Years later, I understand now:
You weren’t silent.
You were waiting for me to hear you inside myself.

Not in shame.
Not in fear.
Not in the voice that told me I was too much and never enough.

But in the knowing.
The steady knowing that I was still here for a reason.

You didn’t ask me to erase myself to belong to you.
You asked me to become.

To walk through doubt.
To wrestle belief.
To question everything that tried to cage my spirit.
To lose faith in what men said you were
so I could find you where you’ve always lived.

In me.

I used to think holiness meant obedience.
Now I know it means alignment.

You made me Black on purpose.
You made me gay on purpose.
You made me sensitive, intuitive, expansive—on purpose.

Nothing about me is accidental.

And the night I almost disappeared
became the proof that I was meant to stay.

Because I’m still here.
Still loving.
Still building.
Still imagining futures that reach beyond me.

If you are love,
then love looks like survival.
Love looks like becoming.
Love looks like a man who once wanted the silence to stop
now using his voice to fill the world.

I don’t ask you to answer my questions anymore.
I live them.

And that, finally, feels like faith.

You weren’t trying to save me from myself.
You were trying to return me to myself.
To the Miles you always saw.
The one you made with a whisper and a wink and a knowing laugh.
The one who bends time when he speaks.
The one who carries presence like it’s breath.
The one who is Black, and brilliant, and beloved.
The one who is soft and certain and sacred.

I used to think becoming holy meant becoming less human.
Now I know that being human is the holiest thing I’ll ever do.

You never asked me to be perfect.
You only asked me to be true.
And that is what I offer you now:

All of me.
Every line you wrote.
Every note you placed in my throat.
Every flaw you turned into fragrance.

Thank you for the silence.
Thank you for the ache.
Thank you for the journey.
Thank you for the home I found in myself.

Love infinitely,
Your child, Your creation, your Love,

-Miles