The reality was prosaic in a different way: two gentle souls who recognized each other one night half a [decade] ago and who had never stopped recognizing each other since.
Teju Cole
You have been a sharp presence through it all.
I have been the last syllable of every one of your prayers.
Over the years, I have gathered all of these syllables and strung them into a song that I wear around my neck like an amulet against fear and despair.
There is no such thing as absolute defeat while you are in this world.
While my voice may crack and is at times hardly a raspy whisper.
When my vocal cords are hoarse with pain from beseeching the gods to hear my plight.
Where I have to, in the name of survival, choose between breath and song.
In my heaving you are still the solace, the bigger picture, the map of meaning on the ground when I have been brought down to my knees.
You've turned anguish into a genuflection.
A crawling into a cradling of new ideas and new prospects.
A petering heartbeat into a metronomic background rhythm cueing in a new song.
An old song revived, defibrillated with a current of charge, sparking an encore.
This time with a timbre of sorrow, a bass undercurrent, a deepening, an added layer of the the shrapnel of tectonic plates grating against each other rising to the top and settling.
These years have left their scars but the song has an exquisiteness to it, whose rendering stops others dead in their tracks, inviting them to reckon on their own lives.
To interrogate its substance, leaving them wondering if they have truly lived to the point of tears?
Had they lassoed alligators and almost sacrificed a bloodied limb rolling around the floor of life?
Or have they just played it safe and dared nothing?
To live timidly clashes with the complexion of my skin.
An affront to darkness everywhere.
You too, wear this resistance and resilience of a skin, a complexion of having danced intimately with the sun to a 90's slow jam.
A reminder to darkness that we are all too familiar with its ways and we are unafraid.
We wear this skin as an antidote to being caught off guard.
The luminosity of our pigment belies a glowing light within us.
A smoldering cauldron of passion and heat always a moment away from setting the world on fire.
Imagine what the world could be when you and I are who we could be through each other.
From where I stand, the world could do with a burning, an overhaul, a clearing of the fields, a renewal, an awakening... a you, a me, a you&me.
I love you in fathoms that my feet hurt from carrying the fluid weight of this connection.
I love you so intensely that I had been tilling the soil of my heart where two daughters could find root.
I love you so immediately that I can wait...
But for now, a new season awaits.
And I have a song around my neck, a song that I will sing as the snow thaws.
That song, is you.
