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Even I’d forgotten how she looks when she cries—like she’s mad at the wetness streaking her cheeks, resentful of any sign of weakness.
The words tumble out in a rush of anxious air, like someone popped a balloon, forcing it into a frantic zigzag. How long have I stuffed it all, waiting for the pin to pop?
Kayla Zora for Zora Neale Hurston. Keith Stokely for Stokely Carmichael. Kimba Truth for Sojourner Truth.
I think every morning when Ezra wakes up, God gives him a tiny jar of words. He only gets so many, maybe a quarter of what the rest of us do. And he’s so scared he’ll run out, he uses as few of them as possible. Half his sentences are one word or a grunt. Weekends, he talks so little, I bet at the end of the day, he has leftovers.
“You know what my daddy calls it when one person has a head start that the other person doesn’t even know about?” “What?” “America.”
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 together. To see myself not as half this or bi-that, but whole.
Who even is she?
I cross my fingers that she won’t ask again if I’m okay because I don’t think she’d know what do with the truth. I don’t know what to do with the truth.
“Be strong, very strong.” His fingers tighten on mine and he doesn’t drop his gaze or slide a hand in his pocket, or any of the other Ezra things he does when he’s unsure. “And we will strengthen each other.”
Ayeee
“Forget you, Ezra Stern.”
I’d remind her that when we were six years old, she married me, and that it should count for something.
😭😭😭🤎
“…It feels less like I am getting to know you and more as though I am remembering who you are.” ― Lang Leav, Soul Mates
Daddy used to say don’t talk about it. Be about it. The fastest way to shut up someone who thinks you can’t do something is to do something.
“I’m a woman, a black woman at that, working in a male world. If I waited on other people to believe in me, I wouldn’t get very far, and neither would my clients. And I take my clients far, Congressman.”
Message me. Talk to me. Sit on the phone with me for hours and I’ll listen to you breathe.
“We’d have to ask my assistant if I’ve been more of a bitch than usual.”
It doesn’t feel funny to me. It feels tragic that the person I thought I’d know all my life is now a veritable stranger. Someone whose sentences I used to be able to finish. The few secrets I had at that age, Kimba kept. Now I don’t know her at all.
“My father always used to say whatever you do, be excellent,” Kimba says. “Whatever you do, consider others. Big moves make big waves. Do big things. Make big waves.
I’m not his to shield. He’s not mine to shelter. We’re not each other’s anymore. I guess we never were.
It takes most people time to unplug. Me? You basically have to jerk the plug from the wall and toss it into a furnace before I can relax.
🤣🤣🤣me
Sometimes what we think is a fluke is really fate.
You don’t blame magnets for being drawn to each other. But if they’re far enough apart, they can’t stick.
All these people—I wish they’d disappear and I could have her to myself. I could excavate her mind and dig around in her soul and get close enough to hear her heartbeat.
I’d discovered this beautiful butterfly when she was a caterpillar and she had been completely mine. Now the whole world marveled at the spread of her wings, basked in her vibrant color. Now everyone knew how fantastic she was and she’d never be just mine again.
Relief releases the breath I was holding.
I make sure he knows my history, my father’s history, and his father before him. I make sure he knows about all the influences, cultures and ethnicities that came together to make him who he is. It’s a rich, varied heritage, and I wouldn’t shortchange any part of it.
I want to forget that the boy who used to feel like mine is now a man I can’t have.
Ohhhhhhh👀
“What do you want me to say? That I don’t feel anything for you? You know that’s a lie. Whatever was between us when we were young never got the chance to become…more. But it’s still there, and it could never be nothing.”
“You could never be a lot of people, Ez. There’s everyone else, and then there’s you.”
I don’t reply, but just stare at her, unblinking, letting her feel my answer instead of wasting words.
The years fall away like a torn veil separating him from me, then from now. It hasn’t been years. There has only been one long day for us on which the sun has never set. We were never lost, and this place has always been waiting for our wandering hearts, for our prodigal souls to finally, together rest.
“I want strings.” He links our fingers, strokes his thumb across my palm. “Ropes, if necessary. I want anything that keeps you with me and me with you and tells everyone else don’t even think about it.”
“The only threesome I’ve ever been in is me, Ben and Jerry, but I’m wide open.”
“It’s a queen move.”
We eat one sandwich together, exchanging bites and kisses, alternating with sips of wine from one glass. In this moment by the water in moonlight, we share everything.
“I don’t just want you when you’re strong. I want you when you’re vulnerable, when you’re lost, when you’re not sure. I see the armor you have to put on to make it in your world. I just want you to know here, with me, you can take the armor off.”
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want him to tell her, doesn’t want to hurt her any more than she obviously is already. But the alpha part of me that feels like he’s always been mine since the day we were born wants to pin her to the wall and growl that he was on loan, but he’s mine again and she will back the fuck down.
Having no control makes me feel like one of those blow-up wavy, flailing things you see advertising tires and used cars.
I resent him and fall deeper in love with him in the same breath.
“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.”
“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.”
Hazak, Hazak, Venithazek. Be strong, be very strong, and we will strengthen each other.
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.
“Study your queen so you can give her what she wants without asking.” Nipsey Hussle, Musician, Activist, Entrepreneur
