How do you resurrect a lie and call it love?
Your silence is the kind that shatters windows and disturbs the peace.
It is all the things you should have said but never did.
It is the core of your cowardice and the confirmation of all my doubt.
It stirs up anxiety,
Turns me into the crazy Black womxn who demands answers,
Who has conversations on her own,
Laughing loudly to nobody in particular because she is the joke.
I scratch my scalp until it is raw: the answers are not trapped under my nails.
What is dead is my will to let Love love me.
The desire burns on but the will is no more.
I don’t think Love loves me when I’m like this.
When I have laid to rest insecurities,
When I am no longer the aftermath of a messy divorce
Or the face on a therapist’s brochure.
So I’ll add “us” to the list of things that I loved until the point of suffocation:
Eddy, my pug
The aloe I got from my gran (how did I manage to kill something that needs so little to live?)
I will bury them in the void you left-where occasionally wind blows.
Oh, and my love.
I will bury it in the backyard of my dreams where it can safely take root;
Hurting no one.
A 20-something-year-old Black girl trying to make waves and create a legacy of hope and visibility through unapologetic literature.