Lost Letter on the Shorelines of My First Love

Dear Amore,

I’m writing to you from a body extinguished by the fire of your departure. This is to say, I’m telling the story of my soul longing not just to forget all of its experiences with you, but what these experiences mean to it within itself. But the problem with longing to forget is the way memory pulls on us; like gravity, it defies all fields and holds us at a standstill. To forget is to remember. This is the place where rising from the abyss of memories could be the bare minimum that freedom could help us acquire. I am caught within the crosshairs of what I want to forget and all I had to say, of the desperation to reclaim and denounce you simultaneously — of the trenches of polar opposites — the road where I watched you walk away and, in return, watched myself fade into the dark as the shimmer of the colors in my life went with you — and along, my stories with it.

My mind circles back to the first day I met you: an Africana queen, hair braided in cornrows, wearing a batik dress with masks and colors showing how much you put on your identity with pride. I watched as the sun beamed on your skin and how you lit up like the Northern Lights of Ireland; I could see your mixed shade, your body that’s not black or white, not brown or tan, just soothing. Just there. I could tell you’re the unimaginable medium where race intersects— that neither one nor the other could claim you. It was a moment where I didn’t need my glasses again; it was a space where the world ceased to exist when your eyes met mine. It became the hour I fully understood the human estuary — your river flowing into my sea, but just a fragment of us mixing.

God’s truth, I had hoped our mixing could have been prolonged, but the nudge from your sister, whose head, covered with a pale blue hijab, and hands painted with henna as if it were a Diwali celebration, stole your eyes away from mine. I stood in an elliptic state, the only sound I could hear was my heart contracting like a black man shot in his own home because the community where he lives doesn’t fancy niggerology. And even though I am black, the nigger in me had marveled at how much love has created an indifference between you and your sister. Your bodies were in sync — hand movements, feet rhythm, posture — a moment where batik and hijab mattered, but then it didn’t — this is what sociologists call the chameleon effect. I remember witnessing this effect unfold before my eyes, the eyes that had met yours a while ago, surmounted every pillar fear had erected in my body to meet you.

Walking across the stenched marble floors and watching my reflection through the ground as I came closer toward you was one of the bravest moments that defined my manhood. Maybe if time had been reversed and history rewritten, this would have been the moment of a rude awakening where the Atlantic no longer treated black women and men like cargoes. This would have been the deus ex machina for plantation workers and owners to meet eye-to-eye and never beneath. I remember searching my pockets and the depths of my mind to greet you. What mattered was that I was there, but the even more pertinent point is: just being there isn't enough. Or, as Ta-Nehisi would say, “Being there doesn’t translate to being present.”

I remembered your smile, which is an extension of your body, met me halfway during my endless search for the right words. You stretched out your hands to reconcile the space between two worlds — yours and mine. This was the moment of our unison, a defined circumstance where we couldn’t tell if we were in love, but had felt the final, single mixing of our souls. And because certain things are first felt between souls, because it takes the union of souls to ignite the body, because anything without the soul’s involvement is utterly meaningless, we were endowed by the ecstasy and meaning we found that day. It was when, in this big and illustrious universe, our true beginning and end had started.

We were swept off our feet by the intertwining of our souls. The endless long-hour phone calls filled with hearing your stories that have never left me. The one where every scar on your body was either a byproduct of defiance, selflessness, or just the urge to explore something new. Your stories about how, as a baby, you would wait for your Arab-African mom to fall asleep just to begin crying because you wanted more attention. But then here I’d come: willing to devote every ounce of myself to you. You were not the medium of my happiness; you were happiness itself. And if you weren’t born, God’s truth, the world would have remained a mighty stranger. I would have been locked up in an expansionist universe where a good story would have been used to justify my extinction. The same way “good stories” are justifying why people are displaced and their homes stripped from under them, like a broken fire escape under a firefighter.

Amore, I remember one of the terrifying “good stories” you told me two years after our souls kept enjoying their existing familiarity. I started to think that this story is so sacred that you have carried it within your walls all this time. It was a silent Thursday night with the lights reflecting our thermal shadows as we sat under an antique shop, looking at your house over the steep hill. You ate a club sandwich and drank apple juice that night. You were wearing a shirt that said, “The Border Runs Through My Heart.” You started with a question:

How can two people stay together forever, even though one has drained every shape of love from the other?

I……

I don't know

Uhmm……

You held my hands so tight that you became the palm of my palm; it’s like you were running from a good story that haunted you most nights, when you went silent and asked me never to let you go. You started to tell me about your Arab-African mom and your white dad. About the days when complete taciturnity took over your home, it meant your mom was getting 27 stitches on her forehead at a nearby hospital. I remember you telling me about how your dad would throb you and your sister against the checkered tiles and tell you he was only “disciplining” the vessel that nursed you; his goal is to teach it the idealistic way to maintain a “civilized” home. And because you were there, you were part of that home, you had to learn what it meant to be “civilized” too.

Do you know why she stayed?

Tell me…..why does he get to dictate what discipline is?

Are you here?

……

Maybe —

Maybe it’s because………

That was the first night the sky had sunk between us, the first time I ever felt the distance of your closeness. Then I started to think about why you and your sister were always in sync. It is because you have learned to love each other in a way to bury the discipline of the checkered tiles. It is because you made your love the landscape that closed the borders through your heart. I thought about the occasions you would sneak me through the window, and I’d climb the mango tree overlooking your home to escape when your father was coming. It's not because you were ashamed of me or afraid to tell your family about the guy whose life is irresistibly about you. It’s because you could not fully fathom what kind of lesson on “civilization” your father would have passed on to me. Now, I understand the sudden darkness that crept into you every time I mentioned meeting your parents.

I had hoped, for a moment, that showing you pictures of our time together would have lightened the darkness that consumed you. Pictures of us lying naked on the wooden floor of my apartment in Brooklyn and listening to Adele’s albums on repeat. Pictures of how my one grey collared shirt, the one given to me by my late grandfather, was a blanket on your body and a world in itself that we both could fit.

But I realized, as I scrolled through those memories and hastily tapped my screen, that I was the one escaping the conversation about civilization. I was escaping the burden of explaining to you that the lineage of your father had already “civilized” my kind. I was juggling with how my lips would imprint sentences on your already bruised body. How could I come to terms with telling you that freedom for your father meant annihilation for me? That he’s from a line that claims to love civilization, but is deeply obsessed with the urge to make others extinct concurrently. This is precisely why, when my freedom threatens his power, he declares me a terrorist. This is why words like patriotism, national security, the greater good, and even more so, civilization, have become the famous hall of fame lexicons to justify endless massacres.

I was afraid to continue the good story that night because, as much as I had wished to put my heart within your body and consume every darkness you felt, as much as I intended to kiss the sunken sky away from your lips, as much as I wanted my love to be the only vessel capable of separating you from the darkness, I was also consumed with anguish that could not have given room for remission. I was angry that the bullies posed as victims to lend virtue to their violence, which, by extension, had forced me to become violent.

I could tell that you didn’t recognize the man sitting with you that night; it was suddenly an empty frame filled with unimaginable rage not because of you, but because after all these years, and the endless suffrage, the bullies are still pushing anything against them at the bottom of human depravity, if there is one at all.

I wish I could have told you these are the reasons I couldn't comfort you that night when your hands slipped away from mine. I wish I could have told you the entire truth: that the question you asked me, I had known the answer all along. And it’s a fact that the intangible dream of dominance of your father created a tangible effect on the world. Sadly, your mother was just a victim of this effect — this effect where free speech is only free when it is controlled.

Amore, I wish I could have shielded your body from the needs of summer and winter; my deepest and most insatiable desire is to have held you one more time because you were thrown into the race spectrum. Before you forgot what it meant to fit in and belong, the minute you walked up to make peace with the bullies. I wish there was more time to have shown you that my unquenched love for you transcends form and essence, it is an inner capacity that only a few can come to know. This is something that people are lucky to experience only once in a lifetime. But then everything lives forever, until it doesn’t. And this is why I have left this note at the shorelines where your ashes were spread across the Isthmus of Suez and Panama, hoping one day that your ghost might return — if only to love me once more.