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“But I want to hear the same dismay and curiosity,” he continues, his smile leveling out. “About the issues that are actually eroding our communities. Let’s ask why Black men are six percent of the general population and nearly forty percent of the prison population. Let’s get some outrage over people of color getting longer sentences for the same crimes other people commit. And over disproportionate unemployment and poverty.”
“I can fight a dude who calls me the N-word,” he says. “It’s harder to fight a whole system stacked against me.”
We both gave each other space to be misunderstood, because we really wanted to understand.
“So what color am I then?” I ask before thinking better of it. He’ll probably just say I’m white, obviously. “What color are you?” he repeats, his eyes never leaving my face. “You, Bristol, are a freaking prism.”
“I am his twin, Grip. Somehow I, this unremarkable in every way girl who couldn’t even play a clarinet ‘adequately’, shared a womb, shared the beginning of my life with this genius person, and I feel it so deeply. It’s like I feel his music, I feel him the way twins feel each other.”
There are too few perfect moments in this life. Far too few of us get them, but I am privileged to have this one with this man. When he empties his chest of his heart and empties his body of his soul for me under a starry sky on a Ferris wheel. And I know. In this moment, I know that I’m lost to him. It has been a matter of days. It has been a string of moments. It has not been long enough to tell him, but in my heart, I know I am lost.
The inches between our lips disappear. At the first brush of his mouth on mine, I know this kiss will never end. It will live on in my memory for the rest of my life.
At the top of the world, so close we could almost touch the sky and with only the stars watching, I found out what a kiss should be.
Her kiss woos me in the water. Her fingers on my skin are poetry. Her lips, prose. The rhythm of her heart against mine, iambic. Every touch, eloquence.
“You come back to me, okay?” he whispers in my ear. “Slow doesn’t mean stop, right?”
