Open Water

by Caleb Azumah Nelson

  You ache. You ache all over. You are aching to be you, but you’re scared of what it means to do so.

  You’re sitting at your desk, letting the time pass until you can sleep and have a brief reprieve. You’ve since cleaned the mess you made, but your mind is chaotic.

  You’re reading but taking little in. You’re looking at images but not seeing. You’re listening to music but the melodies are dull, the drums lack punch, the lyrics come towards you and join the wash of your own thoughts, like a tide coming and going, coming and going, the tow tugging you this way and that, and all you can do is stay still. You don’t have it in you to move any more. You don’t have it in you to swim.

  It’s harmful where you’re going. You know this, and still you go, you hide. It’s easier this way. You don’t want to have to question why Daniel shook his head when someone was calling an ambulance for him. You don’t want to admit that he too knew he had been marked for destruction, that he had spent a life so close to death that it was less a life lived and more one survived. When the time came, he was ready to rest. You aren’t ready to confront these facts and what it might mean for you. You are scared and you are heavy, and you are not ready.

  A knock at your door. Your brother comes in without waiting for an answer. He’s been checking in once a day since you lost your friend. Your curtains are drawn so you couldn’t tell what the time is, but as he enters, sunlight flickers. He leaves the door open and the light streams in. You recognize the shadows on your walls: leaves swaying in the breeze at golden hour, the shapes soft, the movement easy, entrancing.

  ‘Yo,’ he says.

  ‘Yo.’

  ‘You spoken to her?’

  ‘Nah.’

  Your brother sits on the edge of your bed.

  ‘Are you gonna speak to her?’

  You turn to him now.

  ‘What would I even say?’

  He shrugs. ‘Something. Anything. Tell her how you are, she’ll wanna hear from you.’

  ‘I know.’ You know this, and still you hide.

  ‘Man,’ he says. ‘How are you feeling?’

  You open your mouth to speak, and your body begins to shake and wobble. You open your mouth to speak, but you don’t have the words. Your brother knows what it is like to not have the words, and he can see the panic rising in your body, he can see you’re about to start gulping for air, he sees there are tears on the way, so he holds you, he holds you close, he holds you with care. You allow yourself to be held, as you have done for him before. You allow yourself to be soft and childlike in his arms. You allow yourself to break.

  You’re coming out of your house, a week after you’ve turned your phone off, when something small and hard and purposeful shoves you in the back, connecting with bone and tissue and muscle. You’re sent barrelling forwards into the road.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  A flurry of long limbs comes towards you, and you push them away, separating from the owner, gaining perspective.

  She’s standing in front of you, breathing heavy.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ you ask.

  ‘What is your problem?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Why is it that if I want to speak to my boyfriend, I have to come all the way from Dublin to see you?’

  You don’t have words.

  ‘I tried texting, calling, I asked your friends, I asked everyone! Do you know how worried I’ve been? You’re so selfish. So, so selfish. You’re not thinking of us, you’re just thinking of you when you do this. And this isn’t the first time. Since I’ve been back at uni, whenever you feel like it, you’ve just ­gone –’ She mimes being pushed away.

  ‘I didn’t ask much of you. I just wanted you to be honest. I wanted you to communicate. Just open your mouth and talk to me. But instead you shut me out. You’ve literally locked yourself away from me. Can you imagine how that feels? Can you? Put yourself in my shoes. Stand where I’m standing. Do it!’ She takes a step back, and manoeuvres you to where she stood, so that you are facing an empty space. ‘How does that feel? Hmm?’

  ‘Not good.’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t feel good! Fuck!’

  ‘Hey –’

  ‘No, no, no. You’re gonna listen to me. You’re moving mad. Do you know how much we risked getting into this? Do you know how guilty I felt for so long? I was still with Samuel when I met you and a few months later, we’re the best of friends, and a few months after that, we’re partners. Do you know how long that’s been for me? Do you know how many people in my circle have shut me out because of what they think happened? But did I care? No. Because when I met you, I thought, I love this man. We’ve always been able to talk to each other. About anything and everything. I didn’t have to be anything but myself around you. I thought we could be honest with each other. I thought we could be honest here.’

  It’s easier to hide in your own darkness, than to emerge, naked and vulnerable, blinking in your own light. Even here, in plain sight, you’re hiding. She’s right about all she has said. Here was a place you could be honest. This was a place you could be yourself. This was a place where you didn’t have to explain, but now she’s standing in front of you and she’s asking you to explain. You wish you had the words, no, you wish you had the courage to climb up from whatever pit you have fallen into, but right now, you do not. You watch her watching your internal struggle. Her features soften. She reaches for you and you step back. You feel dirty with your heaviness and fear and you don’t want to stain her. She too steps back, your backwards movement like a shove in her chest. There is a difference between being looked at and being seen. She sees you now, she sees what is being presented to her. She shakes her head, and begins to pull the hoody she is wearing off her body. It’s yours, or at least it was. You gave it to her but now she dashes it in your direction. She walks away from you. You do not chase her. You stand there, frozen, hiding in plain sight.

  26

  You have been booked for a portrait session and you’re on the way to a studio, because you must go on. This is your life now. This is what you have chosen. So you’re on the way to the studio and it’s a day where the sky is giving away nothing, stuck between bleary autumn and an empty winter. You’re listening to Earl Sweatshirt’s ‘Grief’ because that song aches but it ends with a joyful refrain. You’re trying to feel something, anything, but you are numb. The music you had with her has stopped. You’re trying to play the same song you played together but two has become one. You and she were forever improvising, but two has become one, and without her there’s nowhere for you to twist and turn. The music has stopped.

  If the heart always aches in the distance between the last time and the next, then heartbreak comes in the unknown, the limbo, the infinity.

  You’ve been booked for a portrait session and you’re in the studio. You’ve asked the person you’re shooting to relax a little. His shoulders are bunched up, the tension in his jaw causing his eyes to narrow. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands and holds them, holding himself, folded inwards. Relax, you say. He tries to smile, but cannot. He’s trying to put himself at ease, but he cannot. You realize you are gazing in a mirror. The artist always gives something to the portrait, and here you’re seeing what manifests when you cannot say what you feel: it escapes anyway. You excuse yourself to the bathroom. You stand alone. You gaze in the mirror and you see that you are not a coward but you have done a cowardly thing and that you’re not malicious but you have hurt her and you’re not an embarrassment but you are ashamed. The music has stopped. The rest is noise. You cry. You cry through your own shame and ache and pain. You hold yourself. You wrap your long arms around your own body and allow yourself to be soft and childlike in your own arms.

  You allow yourself to break.

  27

  It’s quieter, here, on the other side of freedom. You could be elsewhere. You walk b
eside the dog, entering a gated community, the door swinging shut behind you. The soft gloom falls off your shoulders in the warm evening. Earlier, the dog had nudged your stomach, clambering beside you on the corner of the sofa you were curled up in. You held on tight while your mind spir­alled in its noisy confines. But it’s quieter here. There’s no one but you and the dog. You watch it bound across pedestrianized streets, writing its own story. You decide freedom might be a narrative. Freedom might be in the place beyond the fence. Freedom might be inviting others over the boundary. You take photos of the dog pounding around and think of sending them to her, but it’s far too late for that. It occurs to you this freedom might be temporary but you’re here, in this world.

  It’s been a long time since you wore your hoody on roads. It snowed heavily for a week in the past winter. Every day, you would finger the threaded cotton of your black hoody, until the smell of her began to disappear. Your life with her unstitched in the same way, becoming more undone with each passing day. You stood to the side and watched your relationship fall apart. It was easier to do this. It was simpler and cowardly. To love someone like that, to know how beautiful and wholesome and healing such a love is, and to turn your back on it required no strength at all. You have always wondered under what conditions unconditional love breaks, and you believe that betrayal might be one of them.

  Six months have passed since the day she confronted you. Six months have passed since the day she said she could see you and asked you to see her too. Six months have passed since you were unable to offer your own vulnerability; she made the decision to walk away and you did not chase. Today, you have decided to pull on your hoody, for comfort, and speak your truth. You do not want to hide any more, even if it hurts.

  This morning is the first in a long time you have woken with a funk in your step. James Brown would’ve been proud. You are sure you all have the scream in your chests, waiting to emerge. You are sure these screams don’t have to be pale and bloody but full and vital.

  Speaking of James Brown’s scream, you want to riff, and talk about a Friday evening, long ago, before the fracture and the break. Uncle Wray and his Nephew making an appearance. Asking the smart speaker to play rapper Playboi Carti. It’s said he’s mumbling but you hear something else. He too is filling the pocket, darting in the space between the 808 and the glittering melody, closing the distance with his short lines and ad libs. Just as on that first night, when two strangers closed a distance, held close by melody. Anyway, regarding ­Carti – less heady, more from the chest; less thought, more honest, more intention. They say he’s mumbling but you hear something else. It makes you move.

  You came here, really, to whisper in the dark, like when you used to turn the lights out, and you were twisted in her covers, seeing nothing but her familiar shape.

  You want to tell her of your parents. Your father on a Saturday afternoon bent over the sound system, scrolling until he retrieves the memory captured in song. Sweet croon, daytime lullaby. The words we have for this feeling are not enough but perhaps the melody? Perhaps the bass, slapping, thudding. A heartbeat. Perhaps your parents grooving in their own living room, slow croon. Your mother asks if and where they play slow jams in the city. You promise to find a place as they ­two-­step in unison.

  You want to ask her if she remembers what song was playing when you were on the train home. You had been dancing all evening in a basement full of jazz musicians, both dancers and performers improvising, separate and apart. When you boarded the train, a handful of these musicians sat in the adjacent seats. You began to gush to each other. Someone referred to the night as a spiritual experience. The frequencies were right. There, gathered together, the energy spilled over. One of them began to sing. The percussionist procured a shaker and kept you all in time as you all moved, alone in this train carriage, together, improvising, dancing in protest, moving in joy.

  You want to ask her if she remembers such freedom.

  You want to tell her of the young man you saw, opposite on the Overground. Shoes the colour of a clear sky, tattoo clasping his bicep. He drinking from a black can, you from a glass bottle. Headphones atop both your heads. He caught your eye. You nodded to each other and raised your drinks in joyous greeting. The gaze required no words at all, no, it was an honest meeting. You want to tell her that, in this instant, one which was filled with the fullness of time, you loved this man. Loved him like kin. You had no intentions of making a home in each other, but only to stay for a moment, only to feel safe for a moment.

  You want to tell her there are some things you won’t heal from, and there is no shame in your hurt. You want to tell her that in trying to be honest here, you dug until shovel met bone, and you kept going. You want to tell her it hurt. You want to tell her that you have stopped trying to forget that feeling, that anger, that ugly, and instead have accepted it as part of you, along with your joy, your beauty, your light. Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be the sum of your traumas.

  You came here, to the page, to ask for forgiveness. You came here to tell her you are sorry that you wouldn’t let her hold you in this open water. You came here to tell her how selfish it was to let yourself drown.

  You came here to tell the truth. That you are scared and heavy. That sometimes this weight is too heavy. The ache in your chest fills, bulbous and stretched, and though you wish it would, the ache will not burst.

  Saidiya Hartman describes the journey of Black people from chattel to men and women, and how this new status was a type of freedom if only by name; that the ­re-­subordination of those emancipated was only natural considering the power structures in which this freedom was and continues to operate within. Rendering the Black body as a species body, encouraging a Blackness which is defined as abject, threatening, servile, dangerous, dependent, irrational and infectious, finding yourself being constrained in a way you did not ask for, in a way which could not possibly contain all that you are, all that you could be, could want to be. That is what you are being framed as, a container, a vessel, a body, you have been made a body, all those years ago, before your lifetime, before anyone else who is currently in your lifetime, and now you are here, a body, you have been made a body, and sometimes this is hard, because you know you are so much more. Sometimes this weight is too heavy. The ache in your chest fills, bulbous and stretched, and though you wish it would, the ache will not burst. You are thinking of booking into therapy, and explaining that you feel like you were made a body, a vessel, a container, and that you are worried, because the days when you believe this are becoming more frequent.

  You came here to say you are scared you have long been marked for destruction.

  You came here to talk about the seagull. Does she remember? There was no blood. Sprawled out on its back, wings splayed. Head at a peculiar angle, a part of itself forced into where it couldn’t fit. The theories came with each observation. From a height, perhaps? A brave bird perched on a balcony, given a nudge. But would it not fly? Would there not be more of a mess, rather than the majestic way this creature had been laid to rest? There was no blood. You concluded the seagull had its neck snapped by human hand and you wanted to know how, who and why. You went back and forth but grew no closer to a complete truth. You could only guess. The spectacle occupied your lives for a few more moments. You watched the cars avoid the dead; you imagined the drivers nudging the steering wheel slightly, before readjusting their course and driving on.

  Teju Cole describes how death arrives absurdly, in the midst of banality. In his essay ‘Death in the Browser Tab’, he talks about Walter Scott. This man, Walter Scott, knows that while he is being questioned by a police officer, a rigid tension exists that, when shattered, will result in his destruction. Cole is talking about watching a man who knows he is dying, who has been playing it cool, playing it cool, until the moment he flees, for freedom, because freedom is really the distance between hunter and prey. Cole talks about being stunned.
Plunged into someone else’s crisis, someone else’s horror. But doesn’t he know? Of course he does. But what do you do with the things you don’t want to know?

  You came here to talk about one of your earliest memories, in which you did not have the luxury of a browser tab. It was a window first, an open window. A stillness to the soft shine of spring. Quiet, here. Your father parked on the wrong side of the petrol pump, but you were in the midst of a fuel shortage so watched as he dragged the hose round the pale green of the family car. You leaned your head out of the open window to smile at him. He was not there. His body was stood to attention, caught in the rigid tension of a man who knows that, if this shatters, it will result in his destruction. The police officer saw your father watching a young man being questioned and your father turned away, placing imagined distance between hunter and prey. Your father rushed towards the pay kiosk and you imagine he was flustered, forgoing his usual charm, dull glitter in his eye like a speck of dust. All the while, the young man was being questioned by two policemen. He was beautiful. A child, somebody’s child! Don’t you lie to me, you hear one say to him. You didn’t have a name for it then, the shoulders hitched up to his ears, eyes widened, the stuttered profession of innocence. You looked to your mother for explanation or clarity, because there didn’t appear to be reason for this. You wanted to know how, who and why. Turning back to the window, a flash of light like a quick shadow. The young man’s hair had escaped his hairband. He was trying to fly away, towards a freedom he knew could only be found in the distance between hunter and prey. A nudge and he was sprawled out on his back, wings splayed. Head at a peculiar angle, a part of himself forced into where he couldn’t fit. Arms, too, twisted behind his back as blows rained from black batons painting beautiful skin with fresh wounds. Flashes of darkness, where the light was leaving him. There was no blood. Death is not always physical.