Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

You’ll tell her how this woman was slight, but tall, carried herself well, not in a way as to intentionally intimidate or placate, but in a way that implied sureness. She had kindness on her features and didn’t mind when you hugged her.

‘I guess,’ you start up. ‘I guess, it’s like knowing that you are something and wanting to protect that? I know I’m a photographer, but if someone else says I’m that, it changes things because what they think about me isn’t what I think about me.

Two people closing a distance made shorter by the trailing wires holding them together.

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 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. She would need you intact, you think. You end the call you initiated. 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. You decline the call. You dial for your brother, but he too carries the house of your father. He will not have the words.

We are all hurting, you said. We are all trying to live, to breathe, and find ourselves stopped by that which is out of our control. We find ourselves unseen. We find ourselves unheard. We find ourselves mislabelled. We who are loud and angry, we who are bold and brash. We who are Black. We find ourselves not saying it how it is. We find ourselves scared. We find ourselves suppressed, you said. But do not worry about what has come before, or what will come; move. Do not resist the call of a drum.

Do not hold your body stiff but flow like easy water.

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.

They see someone, but that person is not you. They would like to see what is in your bag. Your possessions are scattered across the ground in front of you. They say they are just doing their jobs. They say you are free to go now.

Grief rattles about your mind like a loose pebble in a shoe. You can’t see where you’re going. You call her. Despite everything, you call her, your closest friend, tell her that you’re tired, in your spirit, that you have made peace with dying but it hurts all the same. And she sits on the phone while you weep, remains on the phone in silence when the tears have stopped, distracts you with her raucous humour, and when the conversation has run its course she reminds you that she’s there, always there for you.

In your kitchen, you wonder what your tears are for: the loss of him or the loss of yourself ?

You spend the hour wondering about how you will both recollect this evening. You think about what it means to desire your best friend in this way. 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 think about whether she has been doing the same. You think about spillage, and whether this is something that can be mopped up.

It’s summer now, and you’re craving a simpler existence. You want to read. You want to write.

It’s summer now and language is flimsy but sometimes it is all you have.

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.

You’re swimming with her, holding hands in the dark with your best friend, taking large, sure strokes. You had no intention of this happening, but it’s better this way.

You’re like a pair of jazz musicians, forever improvising. Or perhaps you are not musicians, but your love manifests in the music.

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?

You stood to the side and watched your relationship fall apart. It was easier to do this. It was simpler and cowardly. To love someone like that, to know how beautiful and wholesome and healing such a love is, and to turn your back on it required no strength at all. You have always wondered under what conditions unconditional love breaks, and you believe that betrayal might be one of them.

You want to tell her that you have stopped trying to forget that feeling, that anger, that ugly, and instead have accepted it as part of you, along with your joy, your beauty, your light. Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be the sum of your traumas.

That is what you are being framed as, a container, a vessel, a body, you have been made a body, all those years ago, before your lifetime, before anyone else who is currently in your lifetime, and now you are here, a body, you have been made a body, and sometimes this is hard, because you know you are so much more.