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I spent the following days trying to recuperate my laugh, pretending to agree that it was a rite of passage, nodding when the Well-Meaning told me to just ignore the letter. At work, the security team wiped my address from the internet. The night the hit piece was published, a worried friend sat me in front of her at her dinner table. She said, “Eat,” and sent me home with two pudding cups.

When I returned home, I made sure to latch my door twice, the two locks suddenly useful, even necessary. I walked towards my kitchen and as I was bending over to put the pudding in my refrigerator, I heard a bump outside my front door. I had been found.

I stayed up that night, bracing myself, not fearing an attack so much as expecting it. Danger would enter my home—where I lived alone, where I intentionally invited very few people in. What would someone encounter when they entered? Me, on the toilet, wearing a single slipper. Or me, in the night, drinking a glass of water in front of my sink. Or maybe I would be pacing in my living room? If I died here, at 28 and in good health, at 1 AM or 5 AM or 10:30 the next day, what would they find? A rotting plum in the fridge. A stack of bills I forgot to mail. Half a stick of copal incense. Marvin Gaye stamps.

Now, a year later, when I am finally drifting off to sleep, I think of Breonna Taylor, and I am dragged back into wakefulness. Breonna, in her bed. Breonna, hearing a bump outside her door. In her pajamas, or her night clothes, or whatever made her comfortable. Five minutes before she was murdered, she had no idea what was coming. I imagine being dead five minutes from now. Breonna, at rest.

One night, I stayed awake long enough to see the sun rise. I rotated myself in my bed and scrolled through my phone, waiting. There was only one thing I wanted to do. As the sky brightened, I wondered if 5:30 was too early to go outside alone, or did life just seem free of danger the closer time ticked towards 6 or 7? Could I bring my headphones, listen to Flo Milli—"Do the dash, can you make it go fast" — or should I stay totally alert? Would anyone really attack a girl with a skateboard?

It was a new thing. Skateboarding. I was one-month in, very much a beginner on four wheels. It was, I soon discovered, an isolated activity appropriate for quarantine; the board a random Craigslist purchase, a good way (I hoped) to meet girls. The board was The Outside. It was the air against my face. It was speed and the circumstance of summer business.

A few times a week, I practice at my neighborhood park, where all the skaters have migrated to the de-hooped basketball court, gliding over the polypropylene. The morning skaters drift six or ten or twelve feet apart, circling each other and giving sleepy half smiles, unlike the afternoon and evening crew—homies all crowded around the same blunt. From above, we must look like we're dancing or possessed, maybe both. We cruise, then erupt in a trick (or a fall), limbs akimbo. That morning, I wore bright pink cargo pants ("I know you're hot in those!" my neighbor hooted) that matched the underside of my board.

In the beginning I practiced in my running shoes. Pink and green Pegasus 32s that looked very stupid. The Vans arrived the next day, canary yellow, bright and loud as a bird. I couldn’t wait until they looked worn-in; busted.

The Van Doren Rubber Company began making shoes for sailors and surfers in the late 1960s; skateboarders—the surfers of the sidewalk—copped them the following decade, adopting the sticky waffle soles and shortening the store’s lengthy name (“Hey, let’s go to Vans”). The shoes were cheap—$4.99 for a men’s pair, $2.99 for a women’s pair—and customizable, and you could buy one shoe at time, replacing only what was worn and starting a mismatched trend. They billed themselves as “the first skateboard shoe,” and flossed in ads: “With a choice of four styles in many colors, you’ll see that functional shoes don’t have to be dull.”

When I first started, I felt like a seasick sailor rediscovering land, stumbling on her own two feet. My comfort came in spurts. I mostly looked down at my feet, swerving my toes around the board, like stamping out a cigarette. It felt like ballet again once I got the hang of it, all that emphasis on foot placement, renegotiating the controls of my body: rocking my weight from my heels to my toes to steer, hanging a lazy toe off the board to drag myself to a stop. (When it's good, it's not unlike sex: the ease with which I can maneuver my body, the way things naturally fall into place.) As my kick-pushes grew more robust, I looked down at my feet more, making sure my knee was bending over my foot, keeping my left foot just over the trucks, aware of my laces. The yellow screamed Pay attention! Look out! Caution!

One afternoon, I tried to skateboard in a pair of old Jordans—another bullish-but-fly attempt to impress girls. But my feet didn’t feel secure. I accidentally went out in my Fruit Loops-colored Air Max 200s, the first sneakers I’ve been able to keep really clean, and was too afraid of making a mark to really do anything. So now I wear the same pair of sneakers every time, my canvas, canary-yellow true blues.

Everybody loves a Black girl with a skateboard, especially one as cute as me. People call out after me as I walk down the street, board in hand: “Hey, are you any good on that thing?” (“NO!” I yell back, triumphantly.) More than one stranger asks me if they can get on and try. Everyone asks if I should be wearing knee pads. I look brand new, like the way you can clock a freshman on sight, not trusting myself to divert all my weight to a single foot. Cornily, when I can't strike my balance, I try to be a flamingo, or Mia Thermopolis saying she wants kisses to make her foot pop. I am imagined grace—a version of myself who is meeting this summer with a measure of fiction.

People call out after me: “Skate on the sidewalk, sweetie!” But the street feels so much smoother. Eddie, the Parks employee who has nominated himself to be my cheering section, tells me it’s obvious that I’m afraid: “When you’re on it, you’re good!” he told me, after I passed him three or five times. “But it’s clear that you’re scared when you’re pushing. Just trust yourself.”

The whole point is to get somewhere, right? I don't flirt with tricks. After a single sidewalk drink, I try to skate down a near-empty side street. I don't die, so I keep going the four or five blocks home. Never down the avenue, always a block at a time. I pick up the board whenever a car passes by, then just slowing to a stop, then continuing to cruise, taking up my space while the cars take up theirs. Stress can accompany exertion: in 2015, Kathryn Schultz wrote about a recent study in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, where runners were asked to narrate their inner monologue: after psyching themselves up and gauging how much longer until they could stop, "the runners mostly thought about how miserable it was to run." And as I skate, attentive and alert, I think about all the ways I might injure myself: that crack, right up ahead, that sneaky pothole. An empty soda can, a surprise chicken bone, a glittering path of glass shards. It was June, and at night, protestors were being kettled on the Brooklyn Bridge; friends thrown into jail; a curfew, irrational and fascistic, had been laid down as law. Covid cases kept rising. I kept skateboarding, wanting to be afraid of something else.

That restless morning, I got to the park a little after 6:30. It was already packed: workout buddies, loudly holding each other accountable; one lone man dribbling and hitting the ball off the backboard. I looped around the court, bending my knees for circles. I showed off my skating to Close Friends: oohs and aahs ensued. My bright canary feet in third position, the charcoal grip tape, the warm greens and brick red and sharp white of the court. A friend asked me to teach her and I admitted I had only been teaching myself, watching YouTube videos and the boys in the park, trying to replicate their actions. She asked, “But aren’t you afraid you’ll die?”

After a sweaty, late afternoon session, I took a tepid bath, watched a movie. Three minutes into her documentary The Giverny Document, filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary asks the Black women who walk on the street before her: “Do you feel safe in your body, and in general?” One answers: “Not necessarily, especially not in New York…It’s already not safe being Black, and women don’t get equality and stuff like that.”

Of course I don’t feel safe in my body, always attentive, always alert, on the street or in my home; of course I'm afraid that I will die, speeding into a lamppost or flipping over a low gate or crashing my nose and brain-guts into the pavement. But what a perverse relief to experience a danger of my own creation. I never feel safe, but I feel free.

Jazmine Hughes is a story editor for The New York Times Magazine.