periodgeese:

what she says: im fine

what she means: i can’t stop thinking about the scene in Black Panther where Erik takes the heart-shaped herb and is transported to the ancestral plane, but his father’s tortured and unresolved relationship with his homeland means he’s residing in a kind of purgatory trapped in Oakland with glimmers of the Wakandan spiritual plane seen outside the windows just beyond reach. N’Jobu sees his grown son, so scarred and angry beyond help, and wonders aloud the same doubt in the heart of every diasporic parent whether he ruined his child’s life by raising him in this foreign land, making him someone who belongs nowhere, someone who has lost his true identity and its accompanying possibility of wholeness. “maybe it’s your homeland that’s lost,” erik argues, tears filling his eyes even though not even his father’s death had made him cry. His father does not reply, and Erik wakes up screaming, still lacking the answers and connection that T’Challa was able to get from his own father.