The Furrows

by Namwali Serpell

The glass of the ceiling light in the hall was foggy, a trapped sun making itself sweat.

Because at home, the world was tilted now and Wayne’s absence in our lives had become the drain toward which everything ran.

The lore was a loop at the end of a rope, a lasso endlessly tossed, catching nothing.

You glance in the mirror each day, and some days it isn’t you but a goblin glaring back. And how do you know if it’s the image that’s changed or your vision?

It’s always a surprise, isn’t it? The possibility of sex. A breach of the borders of body.

It was the same old English, except we somehow needed more words to work around all the ones we couldn’t say.

This was our way—a normal quarrel darkening quickly with everything between us.

One second, then another, each stitching me back into time, into a before and an after and no folds.

Life seems both monotonous and constantly interrupted, a punctuated heartmonitor line of events, with maybe some befores and afters on either side of the peaks. Time doesn’t creep like a worm or fly like an arrow anymore. It erupts. It turns over. Shocks. Revolutions. Cycles.

The world is never what you think it is. It can turn over and expose itself to be the exact opposite.

Watching him now, I was in awe of his unbotheredness. He had left us in the pit of death and gone on to conquer life. He had left behind our terrible itching urgency.

They formed a chiming chorus of misery and warning: Never fall in love, but if you do, never commit, but if you do, never marry, but if you do, never have a kid, but if you do, have only one, no matter what, you must absolutely never have more than one.

I’ve spent too many years regretting being the specific daughter of my specific mother to feel optimistic about parenthood.

I’m wishing she’d look back at me, let a smile sunrise up her face. Her smile is nice, and useful. But it’s rare and it goes away quick, like something closing its wings.

He served lattes, sang backup for a glam-punk band, made intricate zines, cruised the White Ho, and had a heart so broken it was always leaking love.

It’s like you dead, and now you gotta spend the rest of your days as a ghost to the life you was sposed to be livin.

As the afternoon passes, time starts to fold under its own weight like honey.

Sometimes I tell myself: You won. You got him. But sometimes I’m like Man, you aint got nobody but yourself.

Men so weak that I have to break up with myself for them. Sperm on crutches, Grandma Rose would’ve said.

I don’t matter, you don’t matter, we’re all just matter, codes, scrambles of signs and symbols, the language the world mumbles to itself, or maybe its consciousness, our eyes and ears and mouths sprouting from it like polyps, here to watch and hear and sense it, to record its events and ruptures, its growing and its rotting, its dismal spin.

Because isn’t it every unlikelihood that we found each other and survived and are forgiven? Isn’t it a miracle that fortune tiptoed in and took our hands in its ghostly ones and joined us? Isn’t it a small mercy?

I will love you till the end of time, but how will we know if it’s the end? What if it happens when we’re not paying attention?