Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

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

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.

Which is to say everything comes of something else. Which is to say from your solid ache comes a gentle joy.

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?

To be you is to apologize and often that apology comes in the form of suppression. That suppression is indiscriminate. That suppression knows not when it will spill. 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 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.

The songs are full of nostalgia, which is to say they are full of mourning; one remembers that which came before, often with a fond sadness, a want to return, despite knowing to return to a memory is to morph it, to warp it. 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.