You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

by Akwaeke Emezi

So Feyi had moved down to New York, because if she was a monster, then so was the city, glorious and bright and everlasting, eating up time and hearts and lives as if they were nothing. She wanted to be consumed by the relentless volume of a place so much louder than she was, a place where her past and her pain could drown in the noise.

No one in New York cared about the vintage of the sadness tucked behind her eyes and in the small corners of her smiles. She didn’t have to drive, and she could cry on the train and no one would look, no one would care, because she didn’t matter, and it was, honestly, such a relief to stop mattering.

She liked the city as an entity better; it didn’t care who you were or what your damage was, it ate everyone up indiscriminately.

“Do you think we’re having a quarter-life crisis?” Joy had asked once, while rolling up a joint in their living room. “First of all, we’re a few years too old for that,” Feyi had replied. “Second, I think we’re just figuring out how to survive a world on fire… that it’s okay to be alive.”

Feyi liked the proofs of want, like Milan making reckless choices in that bathroom, like this man making a fool of himself right now.

She wanted to take a picture of it, but she already knew half the beauty would die inside a camera lens and she’d never quite catch the edges of how it felt.

And that’s something I’ve learned in the years since, that there are so many different types of love, so many ways someone can stay committed to you, stay in your life even if y’all aren’t together, you know? And none of these ways are more important than the other.”

“I was here minding my business, you know, a successful recluse, and then this loud and beautiful woman comes into my home, into my garden, comes with me to the sunrise, and utterly blindsides me. You are so generous with your heart. You were like light. I couldn’t help but to turn my face to you if I wanted to keep living.”

“He loved people being messy as fuck—he said it was one of the best things about being human, how we could make such disasters and recover from them enough to make them into stories later.”

“I feel like the world wanted to remind me that it loves me, and so it gave me him. It gave me a chance, that possibility he’s always talking about, and I seized it with both hands because I know, and Alim knows, how fucking rare it is for that door to open, even by a crack, and what it’s like when it closes.”