Small Worlds

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

I’ve only ever known myself in song, between notes, in that place where

Just before we started playing, someone placed a recorder in the middle of our small gathering, not because we didn’t think we would remember, but because we didn’t want to forget.

I ask sleep to come quick but to sleep with grief is not to sleep at all.

A garden is the only place in the world I feel quiet, she would say.’

We sit together now, in that quiet, as the day gathers itself. Steam rises from our mugs, as I imagine my mother’s spirit does, upwards from the earth, rising and rising, to that place where the sounds we make and the life we exhale go to, rising, up above, not gone but now part of the world, outliving us all.

‘I’m not going without you, I’m just going before you.

The man bops away without a word and you cry as you eat, broken by the fatigue, mended by the kindness.

Dancing solves most of our problems, right?’

There have been other suggestions that perhaps you’re not wholly welcome in this country, but they’ve always been unspoken: you know, when they cross the road in broad daylight, or the stares you attract on the bus, the frequency with which you or T are pulled over, the jobs you apply for and never get.

So really, what you’re both saying is you’d rather not feel your grief now, rather not feel it at all. Joy says, it’s like you want to abandon your life. Like you want to fly away.

You’ll say, it’s been so long since you’ve known freedom. Maybe you’ve never been free.