Like the Sea Rushing In
I mouth at her glittering neck, her skin hot and wet like a melting sun. Slowly, I find her parted lips and we stumble into another kiss. My heart stutters from the fullness of it. I picture us, our childhood selves, sucking mango seeds on the back steps of her granny’s kitchen, the peeling paint sticking to our summer bare legs, our juice-stained hands playing and pushing and touching. And I wonder, have we - have I - been coming towards this moment forever?
Her once lanky, restless body has grown soft and steady. I press into her now, my hands apprehensive and hungry to know her again, to discover. She wraps her fingers in my shirt, her eyes sparkling with rhinestones and certainty. I realize I’m not breathing and push my lungs open. She smiles and I retreat into the delirious sound of fêters - only a few metres away - drumming their feet against the earth. I feel her breath in my ear as she hums along to the soca music blaring all around us. I thank god for the darkness of the night and of us; sweat, shadow and skin pressed against each other near the dim edges of a cricket field at the end of July.
“What do you like?” she asks.
There’s a chasm where my voice should be.
_
Memories fall into the silence like a landslide: eyes wild with childish abandon, messages scratched white into river rocks, our secret knowings, our foolish brawls, the constant Antigua heat. My grandmother’s foreboding figure warning me of the dangers of befriending boys, of smiling around men. Teachers telling me I looked like Trouble, hours spent in the mirror wondering if it was my sun-dark skin or coarse hair that bore this brand. I think of how high-school made museums out of our changing, self-conscious bodies; to be pruned and preened and leered at, and rarely held. Really held.
I remember being fourteen - all awkward limbs, eager eyes and shame-stained curiosity - crowding behind a staircase after class with the first boy that called me pretty. I remember how we once diligently practiced for that moment, her and I, in the pink stalls of our primary school bathroom, readying each other for the glorious day we’d each kiss a boy. My frenzy every afternoon waiting for the final bell to ring, to shuffle out of those benches stiff as church pews, for the school yard to slowly empty as everyone else’s parents came to collect them, the sun nestling low into the shack shack trees, her giddy face in front of mine. OK, this how you do it. Wait, maybe is more like this. Right, you have to wiggle your tongue. The giggles, the concentration, the possibilities.
_
“What do you like?” she asks again, pulling my mind back.
“This,” I whisper. “I like this.”
Such a small word for so much clarity. I like this. In this moment. In this place. I know because... I can feel all of it; the grass tickling my ankles, the blood bubbling in my body, her hips swaying against my palms, the pleasure, the fear. And still, I choose this. The word leaves my tongue tentative and true. It marks something taking shape; the edges of a map being filled in, a promise, a question to come back to again and again. She nods, “I like this too,” and continues to hum and kiss and smile into me. Suddenly there’s a record scratch, the crowd roars and she’s running out into the middle of the field shouting the lyrics to her favourite song. I peek out from our corner of the world to watch her silhouetted body; black, abundant, moving.
_
I picture us back in State College, passing each other under the mango tree. We barely spoke those two years up on the hill, separated by differing class schedules, and the dizzying confusion of expectations found at the precipice of young adulthood. I spent most of my time wandering the back staircases and abandoned dormitories - listening to Lauryn Hill sing about everything - trying to forget the dull ache of my body, already tired, already too angry to touch and taste and tell itself, it’s alright, it wasn’t your fault, you survived. Then one afternoon, I found her crying alone on the back steps, the sharp midday sun splitting her face in two. She tried to tidy herself up when she saw me coming. Don’t you have Biology now, she asked.
I didn’t answer. I filed the question away with all the other subjects in my life I had learnt to avoid. I sat on the step below her, quiet except for her sniffles and heavy sighs. I pulled a pen out of my skirt pocket and started drawing the moon’s many phases into her calf, going over the lines again and again wherever the black ink became dry and dotted. She leaned her head over her knees, watching. I could feel her eyes on the top of my head, her breath on my hair. She smelled the same as she did when we were kids running around our village, jumping across gutters to get to Confirmation class at the chapel.
We stayed there on those steps for what felt like hours, until her boyfriend turned the corner and, reaching right passed me, took her hand and led her up the path to the mango tree atop the hill, her head resting against his chest as they walked.
A few weeks later, I bluffed my way through final CAPE exams, graduated and dragged myself across the Atlantic to university in a sleepy college town in eastern Canada. I spent nights and many early mornings scrolling through Tumblr and Facebook, acquiescing to the insomnia clawing at my eyelids. I glimpsed pictures of her somewhere in the UK, laughing, drinking, studying, living.
_
Now there’s a couple of men, stragglers drinking and dancing at the edge of the crowd, focusing their gaze on her and moving in. She humours them, still revelling in her own high, smoothly switching directions to keep them face-to-face. They follow her hips like moths to a light and the trio start moving in unison, trading dance moves, teasing, hyping. Something familiar creeps into my bones and my legs feel unsteady. I fold my arms across my chest but can’t help laughing as I watch. The euphoria of it all is infectious, eclipsing the insecurities settling in my marrow. She runs back to me before I have a chance to shake it off, leaving the men to dance themselves back into the mass of bodies swaying in the night. We collapse onto the dewy grass, breathe in the bass thump thump thumping through the air.
“When did you know?” I ask, studying her face, waiting.
“I was queer?” She pauses. “I think I always knew, y’know? But I guess I really figured it out during my last year. I was taking a class on feminism and sexuality and I ended up in a group with some amazing people. It’s like you don’t know what’s possible until you actually see it y’know. What about you?”
When did I realize I was queer. How do you read backwards? How do you read between and under and through a life lived thinking there was nothing else? The anti-man dem, Sodom and gomorrah, a wife turned into a pillar of salt, man-royals, Family Life instead of Sex-Ed classes, dating the boy you met in high school on and off again for far too many years, the calls of lurid men along Market Street, ‘shim’, condoms, abstinence, sexual harrassment, coercive sex, mediocre sex, orgasms?, your grandmother watching you bathe to make sure you don’t touch yourself, the body and blood of Jesus Christ, baptism by shame, baptism by fire, baptism. A life that squeezes and squeezes until you can barely see or move or wonder.
She touches my hand, lacing her fingers and a few blades of grass between mine.
“I always knew,” I say.
Like a secret treasure, a silent prayer, a spell. I fall in love with people: the form another body takes against my body; the shape of a voice in the air; the colour of a laugh; the taste of care; the hum of safety and desire; the quality of a glance; the intimacy of asking and asking again; being on my knees, looking down at someone else on theirs; feeling and fumbling through the hurts, through life, towards pleasure; a hand on a hand knowing that gender and sexuality are whatever and exactly what you want them to be; I like this.
She sighs, leans her head on my shoulder as we watch the lights and bodies rock before us. I’ve been on island for three months now, leaving Canada as my student visa expired back in May. One afternoon on my way to my aunt’s store in Redcliffe Quay, I heard my name. I glanced around, noncommittal, as I kept walking. I heard it again. And there she was, braids up in a bun, her body dusted with salt and sand. I could see her eyes smiling behind her sunglasses, the summer’s heat pressing down on us.
Now, she’s saying my name again, and I breathe it in. There’s a tightness that’s lived in me for decades. I can feel it squeezing up my throat, pushing against all the borrowed lies I’d been keeping in. It’s filling my head like the sea rushing into a hole in the sand. I feel something emerging, the way water carves history out of stone. She says my name and I breathe like I’m learning how to live. I feel open - more open than I’ve ever been - endless nerves, possibility and light.
_
Photography by our resident storyteller, Annetta Jackson
Model: Erykah Joseph