Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

Perhaps in your life you’ve come across a force that matched and moved you. Maybe it changed you so profoundly that when you look back at the landscape of your life, you are struck by the indelible the mark it left.

the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder,

I’d hated my body for a long time, hated all the ways I felt it had betrayed me.

I envied anyone who didn’t hate their body. People who ate without hesitation or pre-emptive shame at how all those calories would stretch their flesh.

Body too soft in all the wrong ways—and marked by an invisible unerasable ugliness.

Kambirinachi felt something waiting for her, paused patiently at a particular point in time. A gift, perhaps, that would justify her choice to stay in this alive way that seemed more about losing to love and eating to stay living than anything else.

We kissed like a fervent prayer

“ANEMOIA” IS A WORD I FOUND A FEW YEARS AGO ON a website called the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It means nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

she tended to the garden of her life and grew a community. A community that shows up to her engagement party and packs her backyard dense with swaying bodies. Perhaps this is what happens when you stay home instead of eagerly launching yourself into the diaspora and disappearing from everything that shaped you. You get a celebration, familiarity, home.

“The smell of rain on dry earth,” Kambirinachi replied. “Petrichor, from the Greek word ‘pétrā,’ which means ‘stone,’ and ‘īchōr,’ which, in Greek mythology, is the fluid that flows through the veins of their gods.”

If she could climb down the throat of an orgasm and rest, eternal, in its belly, and if she could sink into and be sealed beneath every delicious bite of every delightful thing—oh, how she would, she would, she would. But life pushes forth, persistently, the afterglow of even the most transcendent climax will fade; every tasty thing is digested and turns to shit. Mundanity is persistent. Periods must be dealt with, blood rots, dishes must be done, everything tarnishes and ends. It’s just that beginnings are so seductive, the promise of possibilities.

Beyond the fact of pleasure, it was merely the thrill of being with someone. Being with an entirely separate universe of a person who wanted to be with her in return. And the ways that it could, even if only until the delicious edge of an orgasm, quell the loneliness in her skull.

KAMBIRINACHI’S GRIEF WAS PERMANENT.

Life is an ambivalent lover. One moment, you are everything and life wants to consume you entirely. The next moment, you are an insignificant speck of nothing. Meaningless.

We kiss the way we do when we know we’ll be apart for some time, a deep and desperate compensation for all the kisses that will be missed until we see each other again.

I miss you all the time. You’re all the good parts, and I don’t want to continue like this,”