Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Love made you Black, as in, you were most coloured when in her presence.

is there a greater flex than love?

I met this woman and she wasn’t a stranger. I knew we had met before. I knew we would meet again. How did you know? I just knew.

You feel you have never been strangers. You do not want to leave each other, because to leave is to have the thing die in its current form and there is something, something in this that neither is willing to relinquish.

The rush of memories like the tow of the ocean, the recollection of a man for whom love was not always synonymous with care.

Under what conditions does unconditional love become no more? The answer is you will never not cry for your father. You don’t always like those you love unconditionally.

‘I’ll order. Chinese, Indian, Thai, Caribbean?’ you ask. ‘It’ll never arrive if you order Caribbean.

‘Can I be honest?’ ‘Go on.’ ‘I don’t really have an excuse. I’m just late. Was being lazy.’

Like Baldwin said, you begin to think you are alone in this, until you read.

‘I guess this is goodbye.’ ‘For now,’ you say, hoping the disappointment doesn’t show. You don’t want your time together to end.

You dial for your father, but you know he will not have the words. He will hide behind a guise, he will tell you to be a man. He will not tell you how much he hurts too, even though you can hear the shiver in the timbre of his voice.

We are all hurting, you said. We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard. We find ourselves mislabelled. We who are loud and angry, we who are bold and brash. We who are Black. We find ourselves not saying it how it is. We find ourselves scared. We find ourselves suppressed, you said.

‘There are really only two plot devices when writing: a stranger comes to

town, or a person goes on a journey. All good work is just variations of these ideas.’

Lying together, sober, with only the vague shape of her as a guide for existing, feeling safe. Is that what love is? The feeling of safety?

Donatien Grau’s words: When the mind is lost in ecstasy, there is no condition for self-reflection, self-questioning.

the five-day stretch in which you have barely left each other, in which nothing really happened but two friends sharing a bed and knowing an intimacy some never will.

sometimes it’s easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light.

You want to take a plane somewhere, and walk.

It’s summer now, and you’re craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write.

How strange a life you and other Black people lead, forever seen and unseen, forever heard and silenced.

And how strange a life it is to have to carve out small freedoms, to have to tell yourself that you can breathe.

That anger which is the result of things unspoken from now and then, of unresolved grief, large and small, of others assuming that he, beautiful Black person in gorgeous Black body, was born violent and dangerous;

You’re mad because Stephen and Alton and Michael and you, you too, received a warning but you didn’t know where or when or how the danger would arrive. You just knew you were in danger. You’re not in danger here, but the tears fall all the same.

You wonder what it means to know someone, and whether it’s possible to do so wholly. You don’t think so. But perhaps in the not knowing comes the knowing, born of an instinctive trust that you both struggle to elucidate or rationalize. It just is.

she says, ‘I love you, you know?’ She has swum out into open water, and it is not long before you join her. You take but a moment before saying, ‘I love you too.’

But you’d hate to conflate, so you stay silent. It’s enough to be in this room, in this space, where those who are usually looked at, and objectified, are seen, heard; can live, laugh, breathe.

It’s one thing to be looked at, and another to be seen; you’re scared that she might not just see your beauty, but your ugly too.

‘This feels good,’ she says. ‘This has felt good. I’ve enjoyed this summer together.’ ‘It’s not over yet,’ you say, but she’s already asleep.

Carnival Sunday. You’re scraping the plate with your forks. Leftovers from the day before, rice and peas, jerk chicken, the meat slipping from the bone.

She’s where you left her, in bed, the grin still traced on her lips, her words still echoing pleasantly, like laughter: ‘Did you really think we would take a nap?’

There’s mimicry of broken English, like patois was a luxury, rather than a necessity, like the language did not emerge from Black body being split. There’s a Rasta wig here too. You are unsurprised that you don’t have fun.

You have never loved from a distance, but then you have never known love like this. You want to tell yourself, and her, that it will be OK, that nothing will change, but you don’t know.

You tell her she deserves to be loved in the way you love her, and she starts to cry, quiet as rain.

jokes at your expense, implying a criminality or lack of intellect; others wanting to co-opt a word they dare not say in your presence, like they have not plucked enough from you; the wearying practice of being looked at, not seen.

you like to watch rappers freestyling, because there is something wonderful about watching a Black man asked to express himself on the spot, and flourishing.

Your few days together have been spent doing nothing really, which is something, is an intimacy in itself.

Sometimes you don’t know why you feel this way. Heavy and tight and tired. It’s like the incomplete version of yourself is in dialogue with the more complete parts.

You know that this day could be the day but still you laugh it off when your partner says she’s concerned for you to travel at night. You flash the smile of a king but you both know regicide is rife.

Sometimes you forget to be you is to be a Black body, and not much else.

‘I’m still in love with you,’ interpolating the classic. It makes you think of her, of playing this song, holding her neat waist, pulling her close, closer, feeling her smile as she lets the back of her neck settle into your chest.

You push, knowing it’s easier to retreat than showing her something raw and vulnerable. Than showing her you.

Freedom might be inviting others over the boundary.

You have always wondered under what conditions unconditional love breaks, and you believe that betrayal might be one of them.

Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be the sum of your traumas.

Saidiya Hartman describes the journey of Black people from chattel to men and women,

Research

Teju Cole describes how death arrives absurdly, in the midst of banality. In his essay ‘Death in the Browser Tab’,

Look up

But what do you do with the things you don’t want to know?

how the body kills itself from the inside out, how hurt can manifest in various forms.

flexing is being able to say the most in the least amount of words, is there a greater flex than love?