Open Water

You live broken, you live small, lest someone makes you smaller, lest someone break you. You are Black body, container, vessel, property.

How strange a life you and other Black people lead, forever seen and unseen, forever heard and silenced.

To not fill your time with someone is to trust, and to trust is to love.

the small moans of reluctance slipping from your mouths not enough to convey what you are feeling. Not that words are ever enough.

You said to trust is not to fill time, but you would like to say to trust is to fill that time with each other.

You know that to love is both to swim and to drown. You know to love is to be a whole, partial, a joint, a fracture, a heart, a bone. It is to bleed and heal.

To give desire a voice is to give it a body through which to breathe and live. It is to admit and submit to something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.

Or do you dance, even when you don’t know the song?

She escapes the frame, until it is just you on the platform, a little breathless, a little ecstatic, a little sad.