Nightcrawling(86)
I was a child.
Every moment passes like water through a clogged drain, barely getting through. Marsha took me home straight from the courthouse, dropped me off without a single word the whole ride, not that I would have heard her if she had spoken.
Somehow, I exited that courtroom with a different body than the one I had when I walked under its ornate wood ceiling, sat on those benches so many before me sweated into. This new body has a chain of holes from the throat to the stomach, where I have tried to bury myself in carvings. This new body got scars more permanent than any tattoo and calls them glorious. This new body got too many memories to hold up inside.
I’m sitting in the center of an apartment that don’t nobody really own and hollering. Like Dee finally infected me, like Mama crawled up inside me to massage my jaw open. And the sun has set—left me in the dark seeing only a glitter of pool out the window—and risen again. Over and over. Maybe three times before the knock. It comes when the sky is just starting to pastel. When my mouth has found its close.
I don’t move, but she doesn’t wait for me to. Alé opens the door like it’s hers, marches in with a large bag that she swings onto the counter and then beelines right for me on the floor, kneeling, pooling me into her until we are a singular body and I can smell every scent she’s ever carried. Every spice. Her mama’s crochet blankets. The skate park.
She loosens her grip a little and I can see her skin, where I get a peek of what must be her newest tattoo, on the back of her neck: a pair of shoes, colored lavender with a K in the sole of one of them.
She fully lets go of me now, so I can finally look at her eyes, which are spilling. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Alé cry like this and I can’t help but lean forward and kiss her cheek, taste the salt, trail up to the corner of her eye with my lips. She is the bottom of the ocean, where all the magic hides beneath too many layers of dark and water and salt. The warmth got hold of my chest, other side of what they say about the heart; when it’s not breaking, you might just get lucky enough to have it feel full, blood pulsing.
Her hands find my waist and a series of thoughts flash across her face, an internal debate surfacing in mouth quivers. When Alé touches me this time, we are on the floor, we are without barriers. My mouth is already so close.
“Kiara.” Her tears have stopped running, but I haven’t moved, and my name is a question.
Hers is an answer and this is the first time I think that this all might have been worth it, that the only way back to Alé was wading right through the shit pool. She is kissing me. I am kissing her. She’s softer than I ever thought she could be and I’ve never been more relieved to be touched, to have her lace her fingers through my hair. Her on top of me. Her pulling back just to stare into me like the stars found their way beneath my eyelids, and I think this might be my universe-halting love, the one that undoes me and keeps me whole all at once.
Alé comes back down to me slow, traces my stomach with her finger like she always does, except this time she doesn’t pull away. This time, she tells me she is sorry, tells me she came the second she got my message. And even though she’s saying all the right things, it is the look she gives me, the way her eyes pull open so big I know she’s seeing me more than anybody has. That she sees me beyond the shit that got stirred up inside me. Sees me beyond this new body or that old body or any body I have ever existed in because she don’t give a shit about how many layers of shea butter I rub into my skin. Alé just wants to hold me. Alé just wants to be mine.
We are tangled on the floor of this apartment, this living relic of all the lives I’ve lived. This girl who has held me through it all. We are gasping and laughing and crying and I don’t know if I’ve ever told her I love her, but I can’t stop saying it. Because it has never meant this much. It has never filled my mouth like this. Like the only flood I have ever wanted. She is saying it back, again and again, and there has never been a truth like this one.
Alé is feeding me and I am telling her about the women I have known. All Demond’s girls from that party, Camila, Lexi, the two sitting on the wrong side of the aisle torn up. Mama. Me. I am telling her how these streets open us up and remove the part of us most worth keeping: the child left in us. The rounded jaw that can’t even hold a scream no more because they take that too. They take everything.
Alé nods, doesn’t look away, spoons soup into my mouth when I fade into mutters. Kisses my nose. Tells me about how it feels to look at her mama’s face, numb, tells me about the bruises distorting the cold body of the girl who could’ve been Clara, about her fear, about how she wants more than this for me, for us. I tell her I want more for her too, want her to be a doctor or a doula or whatever will soothe the part of her that needs more than a kitchen.
She brought me all kinds of food, healing me the best way she knows, and we’re sitting on the floor still, nothing but flesh, leaning against the edge of the mattress. The soup is hot and I can feel its path from tongue to stomach, feel every sip absorbed. I tell her about Trevor, his bruised eyes, how I had to pull his arms from my neck and set him in the backseat of a car because his mama don’t know how to love him the way he needs to be loved and I am not enough.
Alé stops me there, says, “Just because you ain’t his mama don’t mean you ain’t given him something can’t nobody take away.” And if it didn’t sound like a load of bullshit, I would believe her. The only thing I have as evidence is his swollen face in the backseat of a car, his tremors, and that isn’t proof of nothing sacred.