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For the space of a few heartbeats, I let go.
He’s always said he can read my every emotion. I’m glass, an open window. For the first time since I’ve known him, I want to pull the shade.
I’ve done this before—walked with someone I love through a tough disease. When Mama died of complications from MS, it had eaten its way through her life, and bearing witness fundamentally changed me. It’s how I learned to compartmentalize—to shelve my grief and deepest emotions so I could get through life. When The Magic Hour broke out, I was still grieving Mama’s passing. I learned how to smile for cameras and to get through press junkets with a heart torn to shreds. And to a degree, I put my heart in a deep freezer box so I could do what I needed to do, and it worked. Until Neevah. She found
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Who wants normal? Extraordinary wants no parts of normal.
I want you to find someone you love more than your art.
It’s funny how we speak of the future like it’s promised. Now, I feel less and less like I can assume anything, even tomorrow. It does lend life a certain preciousness it’s easy to take for granted. It’s a different perspective that forces you to change your lens.
The best and worst of life make strange bedfellows.
I should be high on possibility, and yet the future is as uncertain in many ways as it is bright.
The excellence and the pride and creativity that swept through Harlem and reverberated around the world—they’re all there. Even now, standing here in the circle of Canon’s arms, I’m an echo of those artists—their talent and persistence in the face of prejudice or war or poverty or any flaming darts the world threw at them. Instead of burning them to death, adversity lit a fire under them to make something the world had never seen. Innovating with their bodies and minds and voices. The chaos and necessity of imagination. And this is their legacy. I am their legacy.
I get it now—my mother’s fascination with light. She chased it for years, committing it to memory and film with every sunset. She taught me what to look for, and when I saw it in you, I recognized it. I didn’t fully understand what it would mean for me, who you would be to me, but I saw that light and wanted it.” He nods to the screen. “I wanted it for Dessi Blue, and though I wouldn’t admit it, I wanted it for myself.”
I can’t say I wish I’d never cast her because then I might not have met her or loved her, and I cannot imagine life without her now.
“Can you just…” She pauses, her voice breaking on a sob. “Can you just let me be sad? Can you just let it hurt? I don’t need you to tell me why it shouldn’t, or that it will be okay. I just want to not fight for a minute. Can you be here for me, with me, while I stop fighting and let myself feel this? I promise I’ll get back up, but for just a minute, let me fall.”
He may not be thinking about Dessi Blue, but I am. It’s my break. It will be one of the biggest movies of the year. It’s potentially Canon’s most significant work. It’s Evan and Kenneth and Jill and Trey and Monk and Verity and Linh and all the cast and crew who worked and sweat and sacrificed to make this important piece of not just entertainment, but history. Lost, discarded history. We have the chance to restore, to amplify people and events that have too long been overlooked,
She’s my sister. Used to be my best friend. Has been my enemy. Bad blood has been between us for years—maybe we can finally find our way to a clean start. I’m literally hooked up to a machine taking all my bad blood and making it clean. Making it new. Surely, somehow, she and I can do the same.
Forgiving is harder than forgetting. Forgetting would be the oblivion of never knowing how you hurt me. Forgiving is accepting you hurt me, deciding that I’m going to keep loving you anyway.”
“Tomorrow,” she says from the screen, from a wheelchair precipitously close to the edge of a pier, “is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that. Yesterday, spilled milk and old news. You can’t do nothing about how you messed up or fell short or didn’t do yesterday. Even when you mess up and make it right, it has to be done today.”
“And this thing, this body, won’t take away today. The only thing you can do with today is make it count, because soon it will be tomorrow.
Better todays make better tomorrows, and if you don’t get tomorrow, at least you had today.”
“This body is a shell,” she says, her voice sober. “No matter how beautiful or what size or how healthy, every single body inevitably returns to dust. It is not your legacy. It is not what you leave behind.”
Hers was a race that had already been decided, a race against time, but the beauty was in how she ran. And I think that’s the point. Every single one of us is in that race, and a race against time is one you’ll never win. But how will you run? It’s not an existential question of immortality, of living forever, but a challenge of numbered days and what we do with what we have. It’s not a string of todays that become yesterdays and aspire to tomorrow, but living like there is no guarantee. Living with an urgency to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done. To no matter what, live with
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He’s right. When you love someone, you truly see who they are beyond the surface. And whether I look like the headshot I proudly passed all over New York when I auditioned, or I look the way I do right now, I have to see and love myself beyond the high gloss. That first taste of unconditional love and acceptance—we should feed it to our own souls.
This body is a battlefield, and my limbs, once flawless, carry the scars. I trust, I hope, that they will fade in time, but I must accept who and how I am right now.
I realized I loved her just before I realized I could lose her, and that has tortured me. I’ve known the pain of losing the person you love most in the world. That is the risk of love, what makes it a radical act. You pour everything into another person who is bound by fragile humanity. You could lose them at any time, but you can’t reason with your heart.
All these years, I managed to convince myself I would never do anything that foolhardy. Why would you open yourself up to that potential pain again? And then someone walks onstage, into the light, and you realize you want to let them in, but they bring with them not only the best of life, but the risk of loss. And at some point, your heart decides it’s worth it.
Forgiveness has cleared the way in my heart to truly wish them only the best.
It’s the lesson of seizing this existence with both hands; of not letting anything stand in your way; of living with as few regrets as possible. Of loving even when it might hurt because loss is as much a part of life as what we gain. The beautiful man sitting beside me in this darkened theater is proof of that.
Ours is a love so much richer and deeper than anything I could have dreamt or imagined, girded with trust and burning with passion. That forever kind of love that doesn’t waver when times get tough and things go bad. That come what may kind of love, and every time he looks at me, I see it.
We, all of us, were not only the stars. We were the night—the dark sky without which no star can shine.
Home is not a song, and it’s not a place. It’s people. It’s community. It’s the bond of blood and the friends we choose. It is that feeling—that knowing you are never alone.
My memory reads between the lines, fills in the gaps, keeps my secrets, and I am content.
