Aftershocks

by Nadia Owusu

could feel him on the other side of the front door when he closed it behind us, as though to say he would be there, exactly where we left him, when we returned.

He holds me like this every night until we vibrate to the same rhythm. Our heartbeats say he is mine and I am his. He kisses my forehead and reminds me to dream sweet dreams, reminds me that tomorrow will be ours. We can read together all day and maybe, in the evening, we will listen to highlife music and dance in our pajamas. These reminders, I know, are meant as consolation. He wants me to forget my mother was here.

The terms foreshock, mainshock, and aftershock have no strict scientific definition. They are used to distinguish the largest shock in an earthquake sequence from the events that preceded and followed it. If an aftershock is larger than the event before it, we rename it the mainshock and the previous earthquakes in the sequence become foreshocks. The story is reshuffled. In the sequence, we only know what goes where in retrospect.

In my journal, as I read Song of Solomon, I wrote about how the navel marks both connection and disconnection. It is corporeal evidence of maternal linkage, but it is also the place on our bodies from which we are separated from our mothers.

In the cool and cold months, I mourn the mugginess of summer, resent the need to resort to artificial heat. It dries out my hair and makes my eyes and heart itch, messing with my vision and motivation.

We can name whiteness and call it out, and face the consequences, or we can sit on our hands, bite our tongues, watch our grammar and enunciation. Sometimes white people are so blinded by whiteness they do not even know, or can’t imagine they do not know, what pain they inflict by exerting it.