Moonlight Movie Review: I am enough

Moonlight or

Why I am enough

I saw Moonlight after hesitating to see it each time it was released in Atlanta. Moonlight had a longer run in its initial drop in the Atlanta market. Living in this wonderful racially and sexually diverse city where your Lyft driver talks about how much she loves her son but knows he struggles as a young, gay, black man in such an open, honest way, keeps you in a bubble. I live in a bubble. With the election of Trump and the more I distance myself from my white, southern, rural roots, I feel safely enclosed in this bubble so much that I have the luxury of forgetting I was/am other in a way that is so wrong to so many.

I think that is why I resisted seeing Moonlight. I vaguely knew it was about a bullied, black kid growing up in harsh circumstances but is helped by a drug dealer and his kind girlfriend (Janelle Monae is a dream, truly). But I resisted seeing it because Little, the name of the main character as a child, looked familiar. I was Little. Other than not having the African-American culture as a backdrop to my childhood (I grew up in a trailer park in the south with a mix of races and ethnicities) and having parents who weren't addicts, I lived in the abject poverty Little did. I knew what it was like to have bad clothes, to boil water for your daily bath, to have roaches everywhere and anywhere. I knew what it was like to run into scary, dangerous buildings to hide from monstrous boys chasing after you like a creature from a classic horror film. I knew all these things because I lived all these things, so I didn't want to see the movie. What I didn't expect was to understand Little (now called Black) as an adult.

I posted something earlier about learning this year that I am enough. Rarely in my young and teen-aged life did I feel like enough. So instead I became similar to the ones who were telling me I wasn't enough. I didn't have the skills to slip into a hard external shell like Black did but I did slip into the next best thing, a mean gay. I hurt others because I needed to get there first. I still have the Chris who knows how to say the right thing to take someone down the way Black did in the scene where he gets revenge, but I keep him at bay, slowly telling him he is enough. Hoping one day he believes it. I thank Moonlight for showing me an ending where I can breathe, where Little can breathe. Even if it's air in a bubble.