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.

Ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love? Nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. A direct gaze.

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.

Touching your arm as you both laugh too hard at a drunken joke. Breathlessly falling through the door, gripping onto folds of flesh, or silently trying to locate the toilet in a home which isn’t your own.

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 dance through topics like two old friends, finding comfort in a language which is instantly familiar. You create a small world for yourselves, and for you both only,

Much of your joy is lost in the need to hold it, intact, so you try to dull that voice which needs clarity, taking another sip.

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 were careful not to breach a border, except you all know something has opened; the seed you pushed deep into the ground has blossomed in the wrong season.

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

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 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.

Perhaps that is how we should frame this question forever; rather than asking what is your favourite work, let’s ask, what continues to pull you back?

You smiled, while she signed your book, unable to say any more. Unable to tell her you have read her book many times and will do so many more. To tell her where your breath catches, where your eyes widen.

you experience a strange moment in which you are flung into the future, wondering how you will remember this. You would like a witness. You would like someone to stop you and ask, What are you doing?, to which you would reply, I’m doing what I feel.

It’s easier to let your bodies do the same, taunting and teasing, short grazes, soft sighs. Working yourselves into a feverish frenzy, your laughter knocking across the room, the noise protecting your truths, or so you both think.

You don’t talk here, but even if you did, the words would fail you, language insufficient to reflect the intense mess of being this intimate with another.

Is that what love is? The feeling of safety?

The trouble is, this is trouble that you welcome.

The trouble is, you are not only sharing dinner tables with her, you are in the process of beginning to share your life in a way you have not before.

You want to hold her in the hot darkness. You want your bodies to say what cannot be otherwise said.

You wouldn’t accept their apologies, nor their extended hands, because even these are weapons in the darkness.

You play this game with each other, in which the stakes are far too high, on the sofa, in her kitchen, in her hallway; you wanting to make a journey, she wanting to do the same but making a diversion before the destination.

It’s summer now, and you’re looking forward to worrying less. You’re looking forward to longer nights and shorter days.

You’re looking forward to forgetting, albeit briefly, the existential dread which plagues you, which tightens your chest, which pains your left side. You’re looking forward to forgetting that, leaving the house, you might not return intact. You’re looking forward to freedom, even if it is short, even if it might not last.

How wonderful to realize, amidst thrum of a bass drum, that sometimes it is a joy to be alive?

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.

You’re not in danger here, but the tears fall all the same. ‘Drunk,’ you lie. ‘It’s OK. You’re safe here.’

You while away the evening together, doing nothing really, which is something, is an intimacy in itself.

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 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?

Faith is turning off the light and trusting the other person will not murder you in your sleep.

This definitive arrives when your best friend breaks the hot silence, cool and measured. She tells you she loves you and now you know that you don’t have to be the sum of your traumas, that multiple truths exist, that you love her too.

You want to lie beside her in the darkness and whisper your truths to her: To my queen, forever is a mighty long time, but I knew you before I met you, so now we’re free. You didn’t have a home coming into this world, but you’re home now. You’re home now.

No one has bars harder than your mum as she prays for you every day that this will not be the day.

All those present grow more fearful in the presence of the siren because when they, the police, are close, you lose your names and you have all done wrong.

You’re free to go now, they say. ‘Are we ever?’ Leon asks.

Sometimes you forget that to be you is to be unseen and unheard, or it is to be seen and heard in ways you did not ask for. Sometimes you forget to be you is to be a Black body, and not much else.

You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you’re scared of what it means to do so.

Seeing people is no small task.