THE WEIGHT OF SMALL THINGS

One quarter, two dimes, six nickels, two pennies. Seventy-seven cents—a geography of presumption pressed warm into my seven-year-old palm. On any other afternoon, those 11 metal discs would have whispered of school fair dreams:––holographic stickers catching light, pencils crowned with rainbow promise. Instead, they became a cartography of silence, a map tracing the unspoken borders of childhood, race and identity.

I wasn't the only child with loose change that day. Just the only one marked. Marked as a thief. The teacher's hand—firm with accusation, precise as judgment—separated me from the others. Seventy-seven cents transformed from currency to testimony.

This moment lives in my professional DNA. It has traveled with me through newsrooms where stories are born and buried between keystrokes and deadlines. Where narratives are sculpted in the margins of what is written and what remains untold.

I have watched stories—those delicate, dangerous things—shrink and expand. Seen how a single word can silence. How the angle of a lens determines which truths emerge and which remain hidden in plain sight.

In the quiet hours between broadcast and dawn, truth reveals itself. Not with drama, but with the soft persistence of memory. Here, among humming fluorescents and coffee-stained desktops, complexity unfurls. Simplicity dissolves like morning mist.

Stories are not artifacts. They are living beings that breathe across borders invisible to maps, that speak languages born between racing heartbeats. In refugee camps and boardrooms, during protests and vigils, they build bridges across chasms most consider uncrossable.

The most profound narratives are not constructed. They are witnessed. They emerge in moments of genuine connection, when seeing truly becomes seeing. When listening transcends hearing.

Every story carries its own genesis. A child's encounter with implicit bias becomes a lifetime's investigation. A late-night editorial choice ripples outward, reshaping how millions understand themselves, their neighbors, their world.

Stories do not merely reflect reality. They are the lens through which reality is created, the bridge between what is and what could be otherwise*—a possibility that lives in the breathwork of resistance and reimagination.

That lesson began with one quarter, two dimes, six nickels, and two pennies in a second-grade classroom. It continues with every story we choose to tell. Because in the end, all stories are about connection. About reaching across silence. About being seen. And heard.

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*Inspired by Ashon Crawley's transformative work on "otherwise" as a mode of possibility and resistance, Blackpentecostal Breath (Duke University Press, 2017).