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For all the girls who have to work twice as hard. You know who you are.
“We are stardust brought to life, then empowered by the universe to figure itself out— and we have only just begun.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
Neither of my parents really know what it’s like to live here as me. To look around and see no one who looks like you. To live with the stares and questions about “what I am.” To feel like a puzzle, pieces hidden and scattered, and always trying to find and fit all my parts
There are so many things I could say to Kimba. I want to explain how splintered I feel sometimes—how there’s something always moving inside me, searching for a place to land, to fit, to rest. I want to tell her it’s only ever still when I’m with her—that she’s my best friend in the world, and I’d rather get punched in the stomach every day than move away and not have her anymore. But that’s too many words that don’t even come close to telling her what I feel.
“Thanks, Ez. You always take care of me.” “We take care of each other,” he says, his voice subdued when he looks up from our hands, his eyes intense.
The words are seeds sinking deep into my soul, into my heart. They take root and bloom. We’ve taken care of each other our whole lives. I don’t know what to do with these feelings. What I feel for Ezra is as old as we are, and yet brand new. It’s familiar, but blushing and breathless.
“Literally since we were babies,” I say, smiling as memories over the years run through my mind. I’ve always had Ezra and he’s always had me. I can’t imagine it any other way.
”The attraction between us…” I scrub my hands over my face. “Well, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t strong.” He angles a look at me that is at once heated and sly. “You must admit we both kiss a lot better than we did at thirteen.”
No one has ever taken care of me this way, this thoroughly, with such selfless abandon and dedication to my pleasure.
I can’t even reduce it to just attraction. It feels like we were this one thing that was severed in half, and our parts want to be rejoined.”
don’t think it will be easy, Tru. I just know it will be worth it.”
The fact that you do things like that, put yourself in situations you know make you uncomfortable and shine that way makes you more of a badass than if it came easily to you.”
💜💜 ugh. him speaking life to her
All my life, I’ve had to be the strongest one in every room. It was expected of Joseph Allen’s daughter. It was required in the shark pond of politics. No one wanted to make room for me, so I had to make room for myself.
“Love is not a tidy thing, Kimba. It can’t ever be perfect because none of us are. Someone at some point will make a mess. The test of that love is how you clean it up. Your father stayed and we cleaned it up together.”
“It sounds like you don’t want right now,” Mama says. “But you do want forever.”
“Daddy used to say sometimes the most powerful move you can make is to be still. I’ve learned that in the last few weeks.”
I need to hear this so bad. “What?” “You save all your tears for the things that set you on fire inside. Anyone who’s ever thought you were cold never got to hear your passion for people, never got to see you fight for them when it’s inconvenient or even a lost cause.”
Life don’t care about your plans. Life will make a mess of your plans, honey.”
I’ve never met a mess I couldn’t handle…until Ezra Stern. It’s easier to deal with someone else’s mess than it is to clean your own. Hand me someone’s problem? I can fix it. But when Aiko got pregnant with Ezra’s baby, that was not just their future on the line. It was mine. My happiness in the balance. My heart on my sleeve.
“I love you,” I whisper, watching his long lashes fall, his eyes close as he absorbs the words, allows them to water the dry places I recognize because I’ve been dry without him, too. I’ve been lonely. I’ve been, at times, uncertain how this would work, how it would end. And now—love, relief, reunion.
There has never been a race, an election, a campaign, a win that has made me feel this way. It’s the kind of contentment only found when you stand still. When you stop running long enough to run into yourself—to collide with your future and release the past.
