Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

You would soon learn that love made you worry, but it also made you beautiful.

Besides, sometimes, to resolve desire, it’s better to let the thing bloom. To feel this thing, to let it catch you unaware, to hold onto the ache. What is better than believing you are heading towards love?

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.

You don’t always like those you love unconditionally. Language fails us, always. Flimsy things, these words. And everything flounders in the face of real gratitude, which even a thank you cannot surmise, but a thank you to her also.

Language fails us, and sometimes our parents do too. We all fail each other, sometimes small, sometimes big, but look, when we love we trust, and when we fail, we fracture that joint.

What you’re trying to say is that it’s easier for you to hide in your own darkness, than emerge cloaked in your own vulnerability. Not better, but easier. However, the longer you hold it in, the more likely you are to suffocate. At some point, you must breathe.

To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe and live. It is to admit and submit to something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.

You feel her turn beside you. You wonder how long this moment could stretch for, and how much it could contain: you, her, the soft rush of cars speeding in the darkness, the gaze, seeing each other here, her heartbeat near audible, before 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.’

You while away the evening together, doing nothing really, which is something, is an intimacy in itself. To not fill your time with someone is to trust, and to trust is to love.

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.

She smells like her, which is a cop-out, really, but if pushed, you would say she smells like a place you call home.

You have never loved from a distance, but then you have never known love like this.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal. It is to be in the world, honest. It is to place someone next to your beating heart, in the absolute darkness of your inner, and trust they will hold you close. To love is to trust, to trust is to have faith. How else are you meant to love?

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

When the photo is developed, she’s sure, if you look closely, you’ll see the shadows cast across your skin, the eyes both seeing her and seeing the world, the honesty resting calmly on your features. If you look closely, you might see a tear making a journey from eye to cheek, as you cry for her. If you look closely, you’ll see what she has always seen, what she always will: you.