in-between love

people think that living a creative life is one of an artist, but the profound truth of it is it is one of love of the innermost innate beings in all of us. to be creative or to live a creative life is one that is led by a dedication to questioning, to living outside of the box, it is one centred on the notion that the work we do is a fundamental part of who we choose to be and yet what we do will never be as important as who we are, and the crux of it all is a process to consolidate our humanity, our joy, our pleasure, our suffering, the things that bind us together with a life of servitude for one thing and one thing only: love. a creative life is fully loving because it is in that space you are you, whole, real, full, growing, becoming and being - in sync with all that exists around you and the infinite nature of your own unique and particular gift or purpose. just the fact that the Almighty created and creates is proof that we are all creative, that we all have the power to create: ourselves, things, others, a world based on the expression and reconciliation of life, love and healing.  

all i know is that i want to create things, craft them, shape them with my hands, eyes, mouth, flesh, blood, bone, marrow and every cell and chamber of my heart, with everything that is in me because life is more than just existing and more than just myself. 

• i want to say i believe you when you say you’ll come back for me, but i’m a girl who is like grit and not sand. what would you be coming back for?
• my body can be an entire universe and yet a sticky disconnect of things that are fragile and fickle on the days that i cannot find my centre/the material of life overwhelms me. my neck turns into the solid of mahogany and my vision becomes the stars that i do not know exist yet
• i admired my body these past few days more than i’ve ever admired it in years
• i am not where i thought i’d be at almost-twenty-three but i’m everywhere i need to be
• i take my time with books because it is like watching a painting unfolding on a canvas. i come to admire each stroke, lines that become the most grand shade of important stick to wherever it is things like that process in me. sometimes i cling to a page over and over until it sinks into the blue of my veins and somehow i grow, branch into it. it ends and i stack onto a bookshelf. i’ll never remember what it was really about, just how it made me feel. 
• do you know how much of what we do is spectatorship? how many things we watch but do not really see? how little we know to be true, how most of what we do is an amalgamation of what we’d like to be or do and how that thing, that object makes us feel?
• i spent the weekend in between my broken sleep trying to figure out if i’ve ever really told the truth
• and then i remember that everything we experience, think, know, believe to be is real
• and then the only thing that can be true is the process of honesty
• so i often write to him like it is a confessional, this is not for a reaction but the bearing of things i cannot weight anymore against the curve of my spine. there are parts of me at stake now, my heart will cave in against itself
• i do not want to look like the fact that most people of colour come from torn apart, broken, wounded, stolen things, but i do. it maybe the green turned brooding hazel in my eyes, or the way my stomach knots when white men look at me. i have worn my country in my hair, a family tree entangled between my thighs and sometimes my skin stays this shade of sinking (maybe drowning) yellow because there isn’t enough sun here to feed my melanin
• last night i tell him all the things i am: how the rebel in me is intuitive, i love me too much to be a woman of convention or the static of fixed culture where it turns me into less than a human being/creation by the grace of God, and all the things i am not: the spaces i do not fit in, the woman that is not a tick box or an imagined being of a thing to love 
• but i’m too afraid to ask a question that i know silence and time and other women’s bodies will begin to fill eventually, i am nothing to come back for. 

I.

of all the boys you have ever fallen in love with, you have only believed two. 

II.

sometimes you stay up into the late of the night, when the moon rests emptily at the edge of your window, and figure out how two people so different could have brought you to your knees. 

III.

sade - no ordinary love

IV. 

you were maybe but five or six when you would listen to that song on repeat, how could such a small person know why it had always felt like so much flesh and tissue? you used to drown in it back then like it was your very own ocean of lovers yet to come and the stories they’d leave behind. 

V.

the first boy they said would always stay, you were inseparable and unwhole things without one another. people said your names like love could be that real, the way they said them together felt that way. you wore his clothes on weekends, and shared odd socks. you kept a suitcase of books and things that mattered in his bedroom by the coffee table. no one needed to ask where you were when you disappeared, they knew you were safe. 

VI. 

the second boy they said would never stay, he was always a distance, the gap between his teeth, the type to fall too quickly in love, he wasn’t really looking at you, he would never come here, you shouldn’t wait, you give too much to willingly, freely, wholeheartedly. you flew 3458 miles to see him with every penny you had left to make love to him for a week in an apartment you’d never see again. the brief of things means i told you so, precaution, next time. 

VII.

the tired in you feels like old re-runs of a tv show no one watches any more, it plays in an empty room you never make it in to, just howling itself into the white of walls slowly turning into the sad grey of a pavement. 

VIII.

they both said the same things they loved about you, their mouths may have looked different when they said it, but they did. 

VIIII.

so when they left the only things you had to keep were the things they didn’t. 

there are highs to my days you know, things like this internship and race equality justice, the director asks what i would do, what i think that matters and you don’t hear that often enough as a young, person of colour in this country, and this other campaign we are building in a room filled with beautiful, talented, shining folk because we want better, we want to do better, a teacher tells us about his story, he is the only non-white teacher in a school that is predominantly bangladeshi, african caribbean and immigrants who have just arrived, he doesn’t want to do black history this year, he wants to do black future, the kids say he is a sell out because he’s young, black and successful, he pulled himself out the dirt, arnie graf reminds him that its only because we are always the token, the one of statistics, we need numbers, we need to demand those numbers, we all have some story to tell about how we have spent our lives as anomalies doing the things they say we are meant to do, need to do, and once done we are still the black sheep. the room falls silent when arnie speaks - at the age of 68 he has the vigour and passion of someone similar to ours but his wisdom and hope is demonstrative of something that comes into fruition with time, to be around someone who has a phenomenal history of community organising with profound success makes us realise that all this is worth it. we settle into our seats a bit more and watch his mouth intently as he parts with things we know we need to hear. 

 i sat and had a conversation with my dissertation supervisor, she is the only thing that keeps me on this programme, a reminder of why i am the politics i am, we discuss my ebay vintage obsessions, the good wife and call out white privilege by the foolishness i hear in my classes like “race categories are fluid, i mean michael jackson changed his race and transgender people just change their gender all the time” and you think that it doesn’t matter what this university ranks, it’s a microcosm of all the stupidity and ignorance that comes part and parcel of extreme privilege, i get bored sitting in class rooms where i only hear the opinions of international students (namely american and canadian) tell me what it is to be british, all that speculation with a smug smile that trickles the lines on their face, i forget on most wednesdays and thursdays now that i’m in london, that this place is even real, eventually we move on to my dissertation and i love visual representations so this is the part that i’m excited about, it’s nothing ground breaking but i’m learning new methodologies and research skills so things like that matter.

i look forward a little - the future i want to have, the things i’ll be setting up and creating, the art i want to collect, the furniture i want to own, the stories i want to hear, the stories i want to tell, the way that i want to invest in non-white business because it’s time we own things, own ourselves, own our experiences. we matter even if (their) history tries to tell us otherwise. 

the part i think that matters when we talked in the dark last night is when you said something like “you were here, and then you were gone and i was alone again” and in that moment i wanted to apologise for every mile that has kept us apart. i’d never felt i was born in the wrong city until then. 

-

we come by way of different parts of the world that had things done to us.

my mother is from a country that has been split in to four since the British left. sometimes she tells me stories of people or family she knows who fought them, how desperate a thing it is to have someone try and own everything in you - even the parts you didn’t think that mattered. and then there were new beginnings and hopes, and people celebrated on both sides of the border and my family back home were the ones trying to create something in us that would last, that we could say was ‘ours’ again even when everything has turned into a long history of drawn out war. the wicked part of it all was the way they split the land you know? they cut us off, sliced us, and left nothing but an empty pit that would slowly accumulate blood and loss and damage and broken things for years to come. see that is how they colonise and steal. my grandmother used to try and tell me there was white in us, i didn’t want to know back then as my body was an inkling of many stories that sound like theft and the resistance that always follows. i’ve been colonised enough, i want to say, i’m desperately trying to undo the work that has kept me caged.

your mother is from a country that was stolen too, it was looted and kept for spoil. good god, whole people into cattle, hundreds and hundreds of years of silence that weighs on this now. the survival stories are the most important, you know? that you even made it across some ocean in that boat and the devastation of things that followed. and then there was toussaint louverture, and revolution and ayiti and sacred land/home/mother earth of things. every time you tell me of how you died and came back to life on birth it is a testament to your history of people born to do more than just survive, it is a tale of the fight to be free. 

-

my mother never wanted to leave her back-home you know. twenty five years on and she feels homesick in this land that still feels sickly and alien against her skin. i wonder if this is why i have spent my whole life searching for home in the physical of things only to find people are all it takes to come to terms with belonging. 

-

i wrote an ending for this back when we’d fallen into each other in those early days, it seemed to settle the week that we made home in each other’s bodies. it seemed inevitable that all this land, the mass of it. it would do natural things like get heavier, become some type of gaping wound or sore, or perhaps the opening of a volcano that can only sleep for so long. it was always bigger than our fickle and futile bodies, love does that you know. 

-

in the deep of the night, the moon shines into my bedroom and i squint to watch your face on the screen as you tell me stories about the first time you made love and i think of your body awkward then, the shyness in you people often forget about. you watch my curves in the light, the cardigan that leaves my breasts exposed. the flesh we go to bed wishing for.

-

i’ve told you all my secrets. i want to say come home soon and stay but in the unreal of things, you’ve begun packing up and there isn’t much left but an ending that we now count down to.