Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

You would soon learn that love made you worry, but it also made you beautiful. Love made you Black, as in, you were most coloured when in her presence.

How does one shake off desire? To give it a voice is to sow a seed, knowing that somehow, someway, it will grow. It is to admit and submit to something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.

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.

Under what conditions does unconditional love become no more?

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.

You have been worried of being torn. You have been worried that you would not repair, would not emerge intact.

from your solid ache comes a gentle joy.

You think about holding onto this feeling for so long, holding it down, holding it in, because sometimes it’s easier to hide in your own darkness than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light.

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.

Every time you remember something, the memory weakens, as you’re remembering the last recollection, rather than the memory itself. Nothing can remain intact. Still, it does not stop you wanting, does not stop you longing.

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.

You fill time, clutching onto it as it leaves you. Clutching after each other in the moments you must separate.

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.

You want to tell her you cannot wait to learn more about her, about all of her. But that you can and will wait, that time means nothing to you and her now, not really.

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?

Let yourself be heard and hear her words. Have faith. Suck at the snake’s bite, spit out the venom at your feet. Gaze at the fading scar but do not dwell. Do not hide but do not dwell. There’s no solace in the shade. Let yourself be heard and hear her words. Have faith.

Name your love. Name the sweet whispers exchanged in the darkness. Name the beauty of imagining your partner’s fluttering eyelids as she dreams in her waking moments. How beautiful is beauty? You can find her lips with your eyes closed. Nothing more durable than a feeling.

Sometimes, love aches.

(But can multiple truths not exist? Is anything definitive? Do you believe in permanence?)

You know the image is false, but it’s all you can see of yourself, this ugliness, and so you hide your whole self away because you haven’t worked out how to emerge from your own anger, how to dip into your own peace.

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

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

The ache in your chest fills, bulbous and stretched, and though you wish it would, the ache will not burst.

You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn’t open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.