in-between love

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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.