You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty

by Akwaeke Emezi

All this was just desire, blind and stupid, and it had nothing to do with who she was, so it wasn’t even personal, no matter how deep he was trying to make it sound. They’d just met. He didn’t know her; he’d just seen someone pretty with turquoise cornrows and a plum mouth, a body leashed in black sequins, so of course he wanted to touch her and be touched.

“You don’t think she loves you?” “I know she does. 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.”

She kept reminding herself that she had a choice, that she didn’t have to end up with him. She didn’t have to end up with anyone, no matter how pretty the picture looked to strangers.

Definitely don’t stay in the same house alone with his sexy-ass father whose fingers you licked mango foam off of! I swear to God.” Joy pinched her nose and shook her head. “This is exactly how incest porn starts.”

“Tell me when you’re afraid. Tell me whatever you’re feeling. I’ll take whatever it is over you pushing me away.”

“I was so mad after he died because I knew he would think it was just going to become part of my story, a disaster I’d recover from, and it made me so angry because I didn’t want to recover. I didn’t want to keep having a story. I wanted our stories to run together and stop at the same time, so neither of us would have to be alone. I got married thinking that’s what would happen, and then he literally fucking died before our first anniversary.”

He had enough of his own and this was hers, her monster to fight and slay and skin, dry it in the sun, hang it on her wall as a reminder that she was more than what the voices in her head tried to tell her.

What did survival mean? Madness, certainly. Guilt, but she didn’t want to lean into that. It leaned into you hard enough already, it didn’t need encouragement.

Heart-rending, cloth-rending grief, but it couldn’t return to that place she and Alim had talked about, the place you might never get out of. You weren’t alive in that place.

Do what you gotta do to be happy. This world is literally on fucking fire right now. I didn’t know about your husband dying in that accident and all that, but it makes sense. You had something that was hurting real bad inside you. I could feel it.”

You’re not entitled to fuck me just because you were a decent human being and went along when I wasn’t ready to be intimate with you, or be mad because I ended up fucking someone else. You don’t get points for waiting for me. I didn’t use you, I didn’t lead you on. I went as far as I felt comfortable, and I stopped there.”