Nightcrawling

by Leila Mottley

By the time the funeral came around, I was too exhausted to give a shit about wearing black and part of me wished I had stayed away like Marcus. Death is easier to live through unseen.

Funeral day is a reckoning, when we mimic thieves and really just find excuses for our tears, then light up, eat until we have never felt fuller, and find somewhere to dance. Funeral day is the culmination of all our past selves, when we hold our own memorials for people we never buried right.

“It was Sonny Rollins. On a loop,” she says, and the smile is a familiar reflection of my own face. We always listen to what music they play during the wake, not because it says anything about the lost life, but because it says something about the people who were left behind.

We’re on opposite ends of the sky, swinging toward each other and missing,

An orchestrated love is almost more precious than a natural one; harder to give up something you spent that long making.

“Her name, Mama. Say her name. Your name mean more than anything.” I’ve got tears to match, voice gone from thunder to blade.

Cop is digging at my flesh and ain’t this everything they said it would be and ain’t I so sad to be familiar. Ain’t this just another night. So many ways to walk a street and I am still just girl with skin.

They take turns and sex feels no different from an insistent punch to my gut. The cops believe they are invincible. They want me only to show themselves they can have me, that there will be no consequence to putting a gun to my head, to taking me. They want me to feel small so they can feel big and, in this moment, they have succeeded.

Streets always find you in the daylight, when you least expect them to. Night crawling up to me when the sun’s out.

We’re always trying to own men we don’t got no control of. I’m tired of it.

art is the way we imprint ourselves onto the world so there is no way to erase us.

“Ain’t mean no harm. We just painting,” Marcus calls out, putting his stained hands out in front of him. We always showing people our hands like it’s proof we’re human.

I wonder if they’ll ever chant about the women too, and not just the ones murdered, but the particular brutality of a gun barrel to a head. The women with no edges laid, with matted hair and drooping eyes and no one filming to say it happened, only a mouth and some scars.

I nod and I know that by trusting Marsha, I’m giving up these streets, giving up so much of what has become my world, at least for now. I thought it would feel like a celebration, and it does, but it also feels like a grieving, still trying to make sense of the months and the men and what I have given up in the name of feeling like I am in control, like I belong to myself even for a moment before it fractures and I remember.

“Don’t help me to fight a life I’m stuck in.”

Just because I know where I’m going doesn’t mean I wanna be heading in its direction,

It was like something shut down in me that ain’t never gonna come alive again and I still feel like I never made it past that day, like I haven’t lived a minute since.”

This time, I am the one to give a pat on the back and walk in the other direction. And we both know there will be no soon, no running into each other on the streets in a week or a month or a year. Maybe there will be a sideways glance from a bus window, a could that be her behind the wrinkles, but there will never be another seeing, another embrace.

I’m starting to think she’s trying to kill herself by way of self-inflicted suffocation when she opens her mouth and lets it out with an explosive howl. A scream that seems to continue past the time she closes her mouth, seems to travel upward, right into a waiting cloud, and spits back at us with a high-pitched echo.

“Nobody learns to walk when they got weights inside they bellies. I want you to walk toward the water, baby. I want you to swim.”

My mouth opens slowly, jaw creaks until there is just enough space for the sound to travel out my throat. Still, when I try to scream, nothing comes out.

“Silence starves us, chile. Feed yoself.”

Mama takes both of her hands and moves them up, toward my face, places them on both cheeks, then slides down to my jaw. Mama hooks her fingers in my mouth and spreads my jaw open like a door with hinges, until I make an oval with my lips, keeping her hands on my cheeks and telling me to scream. The screech comes out in bursts, spasms of sound morphing their way from an eruption of rage to an infant’s cries, moans and whines and all the in-betweens of woman and child.

Mama will walk me to the bus stop and leave me there and we will not speak of what the freeway does to us when it is nighttime and we are ghosts. But Mama taught me how to swim and I can see underwater. I can see.

In moments like these, I remember Marsha’s just another white woman who’s never gonna understand what I been through, who can’t find anyone besides Harriet Tubman and Gloria Steinem to compare me to.

“Because they saw me. I was lying there and they looked me in my eyes and they knew. They knew and they kept them eyes open the whole time, staring at me while they had sex with me, like that only made it better. Because they looked at me and they saw how small I was. I was a child.”

Maybe this excuse is just enough to spin us into a pickup game where we’ll laugh because we can, until the sun disintegrates and nighttime threatens to set us free just to capture us again, back into the things we can’t escape.