Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

prayer is mostly desire from the inner self,

Your house is too quiet, or rather it is loud in the absence of others.

‘I’m not too heavy, am I?’ You shake your head as she dismounts. She wasn’t heavy but there was a weight to her which didn’t match the lean figure you studied in your kitchen. Which is to say there was more life in your hands than you expected.

You dial for your mother but she is still far away, wrestling with the grief of her mother’s passing. You want to tell her that you miss her mother, to confess that you lost your God in the days your grandma lost her body and gained her spirit, to tell her you couldn’t face your own pain until now.

Things unsaid don’t often remain so.

You think as you walk through the night, wandering familiar streets with these unfamiliar feelings.

You didn’t need to explain to her that you felt joy too, that you were angry, you were scared, that walking home in the night worried you sometimes, because you didn’t know which fate would meet you, the one who looked like you or the one who couldn’t see you, or couldn’t see you as you were meant to be seen, or whether you would arrive home without incident, and live to fear another day.

Your hands shook as she handed you her vulnerability, and you struggled to focus the lens on her features.

‘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.

open water,

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?

When the anxieties visit in the night, 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.

Sometimes, love aches.

The Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams.

it was less a life lived and more one survived.

it’s a day where the sky is giving away nothing, stuck between bleary autumn and an empty winter.

The music you had with her has stopped. You’re trying to play the same song you played together but two has become one. You and she were forever improvising, but two has become one, and without her there’s nowhere for you to twist and turn. The music has stopped.

The artist always gives something to the portrait,

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

Under what conditions does unconditional love break? She cried for you yesterday. She has decided to submit to her tears rather than understand them. It’s been a year at this point, but she knows she will always cry for you.

The thing that undid her was the memory of being seen.