Small Worlds

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

I gaze at my parents, and see that a world can be two people, occupying a space where they don’t have to explain. Where they can feel beautiful. Where they might feel free.

I’ve only ever known myself in song, between notes, in that place where language won’t suffice but the drums might, might speak for us, might speak for what is on our hearts.

We’re young and often struggle to express just what it is we need, but I know we all value closeness.

It’s here, when I’m with her, I know that a world can be two people, occupying a space where we don’t have to explain. Where we can feel beautiful. Where we might feel free.

We give no goodbyes – we know death in its multitudes, and goodbye sounds like an end – instead, after our embrace, the soft pounding of fists accompanied by, in a bit, which is less a goodbye, more a promise to stay alive.

many of us, food is not just sustenance but memory, nostalgia; a way to quell longing, a way to build new foundations.

It made me grateful for the freedom to be in that space, to make a mistake; and how that mistake might be beautiful to the right ear;

It was there that I noticed I only really knew myself in song. In the quiet, in the freedom, in the surrender.

I wonder, then, if this is a nostalgia for a time my parents never knew, that period between childhood and adulthood skipped, responsibility coaxing them away from carefree.

We don’t say goodbye – goodbye sounds like an ending, and we don’t want this thing to end. Instead, after we separate, the soft pounding of fists accompanied by in a bit, which is less a goodbye, more a promise to meet again.

When I ask more of Mum, of the time she came here, the problem isn’t that she doesn’t remember. It’s that she cannot forget.

I can’t please everyone, I think,

I’m cold and so tired but that no one warned us about this cold. No one warned us it would be this hard.

Mum having worked an eight-hour shift only to go on to another, her spirit bent, almost broken, missing my father, miitao maya shia, I just want to go home,

Grief never ends, but we find a way to walk in the light someone has left behind, rather than living in pain’s shadow.

Those days I was sure I wanted this small world we had made to stay in this shape forever.

I try to leave behind this ache, which has long made a home in the left side of my chest, but I fear this is the shape of the world now. I fear it might be forever.

We ask where, tonight, we might surrender, where we might feel beautiful, might feel free.

I want to commit this to memory, to be able to hold this moment, forever.

I open my mouth to call for someone, but there’s no one here to tend to my grief. I open my mouth to call for someone, but the world is so quiet now. I’m all alone.

we bump fists and say, soon, which isn’t goodbye, but a promise that we’ll link up again, tomorrow if we can wrangle it, and we’ll feel just as alive.

in hand these parts of my father I’ve never known.

this. I imagine how, for Pops, solitude has become loneliness. How there’s no spillage but an ache deluging inside him. A man stripped of his gleam, slack and dull, awash with sadness, the line between despair and anger a blur, no voice, no music, no rhythm.

When I return to the room, my father is lying on his back, his eyes open. He looks at me and smiles. I kneel by his bed and take his hand. Moonlight casts our union in a faint blue. He gives me a squeeze, and quickly lets my hand go, turning towards the wall once more.

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.

As the two embrace one another, memory, image and possibility fold in on each other. The two men hold each other as they would’ve when they were young, their touch warm and thick with love, a gentle teasing as they compare greys, point to new lines around their eyes and face.

You don’t know how to tell him you don’t even have enough for yourself. That your spirit is bent to the point of breaking, that it’s happening, quickly, quietly, without incident. It feels like the country has intruded on your joy, crumbling you from the inside, making dust of your life. You open your mouth to speak, to tell your father what’s on your heart, but he cuts across, saying, ‘I don’t need you, anyway.’ He hangs up the phone, leaving you with silence pressed to your ear.

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

And he nods, places a tender palm to my forearm, saying, I believe in you. I believe in you, son. Your mother too, she always did. She would be proud. And at this, I’m overcome. Maybe this is all we need sometimes, for someone else to believe in the possibilities you see for yourself.