Everything Is Not Enough

by Lola Akinmade Åkerström

After all, she is the dead woman’s doppelgänger. But hearing those words from his mouth for the first time confirms what she always suspected. Johan von Lundin never loved her.

Over two years in Sweden, she so deeply cocooned herself in Jonny’s world she barely has other friends of color.

A deep-seated responsibility to show the world she’s a Black woman making it in Sweden to inspire others. That unbearable weight is currently being stripped off and replaced with the fact that she is indeed human.

“You don’t love him,” Kehinde continues. “Your eyes are still roaming, looking for options. Unfortunately they’ve landed on a dead end.

“You know, as much as I love you, I fear your arrogance will finish you,” Kehinde says before lifting lukewarm chamomile tea back to her lips.

Many immigrants run their businesses round the clock, day in, day out, not bothering about work-life balance, or even having the privilege to stop, ponder, and decipher it.

She’s still working out her boss’s brashness. Boundaries remain a foreign concept to Salima, who speaks her mind freely without consequence. A woman who demands access into one’s life, invited or not.

She instantly knows they have moved into that space. The one where Antonia grows uncomfortable and society wants the likes of Brittany to back off before the tears come.

“I’m not here for his entertainment. I have my own needs, my own passions, my own purpose.” Brittany’s voice pitches higher. “I didn’t come to Sweden to be dead to myself.”

She wonders what Amani gave up for such deep access into Swedish society, because Yasmiin knows assimilation and integration are different beasts. The higher you climb with ease where you’re not wanted, the less you are who you truly are.

Is her powerful social identity turning Ragnar on? The quintessential “Strong Black Woman”? Is this the same reason Tobias is drawn to her? An idealized image she can never fully live up to because she is in fact human?

She was made for more. This can’t be her life. One where she does nothing while being pampered. On paper, it sounds like heaven. In reality, hell. One she unfortunately crafted with her own hands.

She’s ready to rediscover who she is without being beholden to men. In her teenage years she had set out along a path charted by men.

Can two things be true? Can one feel both disdain and empathy for the same person?

The mood in that room suggests her colleagues are only tolerating her now. Whatever respect they had for her eroded long ago. That bullet-proof confidence she built within her industry is melting away. She knows her days at von Lundin Marketing are numbered.

“It’s more than that,” Kemi continues, trying to cobble together some form of logic. “We’re very similar. I feel like this man”—she takes an audible breath—“like he’s a white version of myself.”

She started pulling weeds of self-sabotage out of her system. She’s mulling over the right time to confess and get it all off her chest. To move forward, she needs to set herself free.

Once again, she finds herself soothing a man when he should be wrapping his arms around her in protection.

“Life is more complicated than ‘stay or leave,’ ‘go back to your country,’ or ‘stop complaining.’ We do things to survive, out of love for our families and children.

“When you come from the upper classes and yet people from the lower class look at you like you’re second class because you’re brown, it starts a fire within you.

“You can use that fire to burn everyone around you. Or you can use that fire to light up the world so they cower at your brilliance.”

“Där är hon!” Hedvig screams at the top of her lungs as she points at Kemi. “Den svartingen som Pappa pussade!” There she is! The nigger Daddy was kissing!

“I don’t know where Hedvig picked up such a word,” Ragnar says, getting to his feet, apologizing. “We’re not like that.”

Yea right!

Tobias seems paralyzed and, in that moment, she despises him for not saying anything, for staying quiet, for not reacting like she expects him to. Her betrayal far from her mind in that moment. Does he not realize he’s also Black?

This isn’t about you being black, it’s about you having an affair with a married man. Tobias is clearly in shock and probably has no words.

“What were you trying to prove to yourself, Kemi? That you could have this man even if society said you can’t?”

“So what have we learned from all this?” Brittany’s eyes settle on Kemi once more, her eyelashes looking heavier in the fading light. “That our mistakes as Black women are unforgivable in this world.”

This is the furthest their conversation goes. It seems this Kemi woman always comports herself to project strength. Even in the salon, she doesn’t want to drop her facade of pride, Yasmiin mulls.

Though heartbreaking, she found it oddly satisfying, witnessing him coming to the realization on his own. That the world will always see his precious daughter as Black first, despite his pedigree and her lineage.

After all, she is a twin herself, she’s Yoruba, the tribe with the highest frequency of twin births in the world, and she’s technically an older woman in childbearing years, when the chance of multiple births increases.