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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. For Taiye, that force was a woman named Salomé.
In Lagos, there is no bubble thick enough to protect you from the truth of your privilege or your disadvantage; you see it everywhere, every day. Culture is a way of life.
I am relieved that she seems lucid, and I choose not to be alarmed by the desperate thing flickering in her eyes. It is so subtle, but I recognize it well.
the absurdity of the prejudice he endured, the fucked-up way that white supremacy slyly slips a chip on your shoulder, only to turn around and innocently question its position there.
Let me tell you a secret: sometimes I scheme, I keep myself scarce from Farouq, but only to stoke his longing. No other reason, I swear. My mother, in dramatically different ways, kept herself scarce from my father, and I have never seen any human being adore another as thoroughly as my father did my mother. I want that so bad, you don’t know.
Oh, the struggle to be better than oneself.
Her aunt’s joy was contagious because she moved in a world saturated with love, despite the rough edges of life in Ife.
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.
“You know, sometimes a queen gets tired.”
“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.
Thickening one’s proverbial skin can only be a natural response to the causticity that life sometimes visits upon us. But there is a unique type of hardness, a single-minded drive to thrive through whatever the fuck, to tear through whoever, to get what you want, that levels everything so that nothing is sacred.
cried knowing that rage was only hurt untended, hurt ignored and cast aside. This is how you make fury.
Ibeji are a blessing, divine twins, one soul contained in two vessels. The off-spring of Sango and Osun, they are the orishas of abundance and joy. And mischief.
And that was her principal vice, wasn’t it? Desiring to be entirely consumed by any and every moment that quenched the hungry howling loneliness that sat curled down down inside herself. 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
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At the core of it, for Taiye, it was a simple matter of closeness. Two people, sometimes more, feeding a hunger to touch and be touched, kissing, naked—it was the intimacy of it that she found most arousing. Though varied, her appetites weren’t terribly sophisticated. 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.
HOLD IT GENTLY, THIS HUNGRY BEAST THAT IS YOUR HEART. Feed it well.
Later that night, back in the quiet of her place, Taiye turned to Our Lady and confided, “I don’t think I’ll be the same.” After her? “Yes,” she replied, wishing there would be no after. BUT THERE IS ALWAYS AN AFTER, ISN’T THERE?
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.
There are so few ways to transmute grief through this cage, and all of them merely ease the seed rotting inside you. Imagine living with a rot inside you. Perhaps you don’t need to imagine. Is this the condition of living? Tell me, how do you make the seed grow? How do you make it bloom into something beautiful?
And when Kehinde is wounded, Taiye drowns in the pain.
RAGE BECAME HER FEAST.
These alive bodies … so adept at turning even the most precious things into vices.
There’s this poem by Nayyirah Waheed that I keep thinking about. It’s something about being in love looking like all the things you’ve lost finding you once more.
I’d never want it to happen to you, but why did it have to be me?”
My fucking hearrrrtt
