Open Water, Caleb Nelson [best summer books txt] 📗

her body tightens, loosens, tightens, loosens with every touch, every graze across the fine curve of her spine. Let her kiss the single tear. You don’t know why you’re crying. Sometimes, love aches. You’re not sad but bowled over. Crumpled like a car crash. Tell her a story. Remind her about that time:

The fever dream of an evening, your minds swollen with heat. You and she swing your hips this way and that, letting rum dribble from the lips of cups onto the basement floor. A friend croons melancholy from the stage but the joy is not lost. Guitars strum sweet like the cocktails in your hands. You are more than the sum of your traumas, you decide, introducing her to your friends, your rhythms so fluid, a double act to be reckoned with. This is my friend, you say, words neither of you believe. (But can multiple truths not exist? Is anything definitive? Do you believe in permanence?) Anyway, this night is a fever dream and you allow yourselves to be led down a long stretch of road with the promise of another basement at the end of it. Is anything definitive? No, because you both change your minds when you reach the club. The fever has begun to rack your bodies and you shake with hunger. You split away from the group, because fever protects, as madness does. Chicken shop, sterile lighting, she hands over a plastic note, you give thanks, you curl hand around bare curve of hip, and she leans in, back, kiss on cheek, a shade of purple she carefully applied earlier. Midnight meal in hand, down a street on which you met another poet many years ago. Another basement. The poet leaned close and told you to loosen up during the ­warm-­up act, so in no time you were in rhythm, fluid, an act to be reckoned with. Here, you sit on someone else’s front steps, and you decide you believe in permanence. This definitive arrives when your best friend breaks the hot silence, cool and measured. She tells you she loves you and now you know that you don’t have to be the sum of your traumas, that multiple truths exist, that you love her too.

Walt Dickerson wrote the piece ‘To My Queen’ for his wife. It’s slow and contemplative, and reaches into extreme, beautiful depths to render a union in all its colour.

You don’t have music, but you do have your way of seeing her. You do have a way of capturing her peaceful and energetic rhythm. You do have a way of portraying her joy.

You do have words.

23

To have a home is a luxury. To know someone before you knew them introduces a freedom previously unknown, when in their presence. Perhaps this is what home is: freedom. It’s easy to stay furled up where you can’t live, like folding a book in half on its spine to fit into pockets.

Sometimes you don’t know why you feel this way. Heavy and tight and tired. It’s like the incomplete version of yourself is in dialogue with the more complete parts. You had another conversation with your grandma, long after she passed. She came to you in a night vision and told you the body has memories. Told you to wear the scars on new skin. Let the woman you love kiss you and allow yourself to be called pretty. Unfurl, stretch out a spine made crooked by keeping small. There’s only freedom here. You did not have a home coming into this world, but your world and your home have become synonymous with one another and they look something like this:

You run for the train. Someone left their umbrella under the seat in first class. It’s raining. You crave blue skies and sunshine. She told you there was a hunger in your eyes, and you didn’t disagree. You come from the same place. Same cloth. Gold woven into the kente. The shirt made for you from your grandmother’s house is pale blue like the peace you crave. You want to give this to her. How do you say the things for which there is no language? Can you think of a time in which she was hungry too?

Returning from Dublin, on the train home, you don’t know you’re crying until the ugly splotches appear on the pages. Caught fast in your throat, syllables being rounded out and smoothed, language descending into noise. This is how you say those things for which there are no words. You want to scream. Two have become one but a hot blade has been taken to your skin and you have to wear these stories like scars. You want to wash them clean, and watch as she swims in the bath, slender limbs loose in the water. Love as a form of meditation; reaching towards a more honest expression of self. Remember that your body has memory. Scars do not always blemish. You kiss them and call her pretty. You’re always surprised by the substance of her under your fingers. You want to lie beside her in the darkness and whisper your truths to her: To my queen, forever is a mighty long time, but I knew you before I met you, so now we’re free. You didn’t have a home coming into this world, but you’re home now. You’re home now.

24

‘Are you getting a trim before I come home?’

‘What’s wrong with my hair?’ you ask, running a hand over your scalp, feeling the tiny curls beginning to kink.

‘Nothing’s wrong per se,’ she says. ‘It would just be nice, you look handsome with a fresh trim.’

‘You’re digging yourself a hole here.’

You keep an eye for oncoming pedestrians as you walk, holding your phone slightly ahead of you, trying to keep your face in the frame of the video call. Four hundred miles away, she flops down on her bed, and reaches towards her camera with her finger, attempting to close the distance.

‘Listen, I don’t think it’s a crime for me