@anarkissm to claudia.
our maroonage from louisiana to parisian cobblestones offered a freedom i did not know how to trust at first.
it rested on me wrong, misplaced. like a coat tailored for another man, draped across my shoulders all the same. i had braced for impact upon arrival, expected the old reflex to seize me—the tightening beneath my sun-kissed skin when eyes of paler persuasions rest upon it, when mouths ready to unleash wave after wave of derision i was all too familiar with in nawlin's. I built and fortified my defenses from heel to spine, prepared to endure what had always followed people of my race.
but nothing came.
no muttered slights. no blanketed cruelties dressed as passing observation. no invisible hand pressing me back into something smaller than i knew myself to be. just a sea of pale faces. passing, mind they own busines..
and it unsettled me more than hostility ever had.
because i did not know what to do with a world that did not immediately demand i justify my existence within it. we moved through it—two colored souls unbothered, unremarked upon—like a lost native folk finally returned. there was a permissive quietness and queer mystique to it. dangerous in its own way. the body loosens when it believes itself unobserved.
and i had never trusted ease.
still… i did not let myself forget.
the mirror saw to that.
every sunless evening, it held me there—fixed, suspended somewhere in the middle of chattel slavery scar tissue under a loathsome night, dressed up as a man who had learned how to survive being seen. it offered me back unalterable characteristics the world had already named long before i understood what it meant to carry it.
no matter how gentle this city proved itself to be, i remembered.
how my features had been read. parsed and diminished. rearranged and rearticulated into lesser, unsightly waste. in other words, the language associated with your color does not leave you. it's like a parasite in the marrow.
but here—here, for the first time—it did not dictate my movement.
here, “bronze” did not corrode from the drunken excess of hate found easily back home. it simply… existed.
and yet, even in that unfamiliar ease, i found myself circling back to the same questions. god. mercy. whether there is something beyond all of this that has not turned its face from me entirely. it is a strange thing, to still hunger for grace when you have become something that cannot stand in the light that once symbolized it.
i think of paul more often than i admit. wonder if forgiveness met him before the fall was finished. wonder if it might ever find me—or if i leaped beyond cohesion long ago, in a bad bed, and found myself inharmoniously dislocated in all the places that ever mattered.
her voice draws me back. i had nearly let myself drift too far into memory, left the present unattended while it called for me. i turn to her with something quieter than i feel, something gentler than i deserve.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ you are the beauty of the moment, ma petite. ” i said, suddenly.
i lift the camera without hesitation; fancying myself a quick draw with a pistol as i am with camera my good eye catches that fleeting shift in her expression—a small, passing thing most would miss. but i don’t. i never do with her.
i take it. a flick to be preserved. and somewhere in the back of my mind, it's a treasure—photographed and stored in the dark recesses where i will return to it later, turn it over, study it, ask it questions it never meant to answer.
i fall into step beside her, easy in a way that does not ask anything of me. we provide each other proximity without demanding it. as well as our presence without the performances that helped us survive this journey here.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ i was real good at what i did back home, ” i say, almost offhand, though the truth of it runs deeper than i allow to surface. “ but this here… got me thinkin’ i should’ve had this on the side. whole lotta things i let pass me by. ”
my gaze drifts across the city, then finds its way back to her.
⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀“ but i will now. i ain’t lettin’ it slip again. i’m gon’ make somethin’ outta this. you’ll see. ” a foxish grin spread across my face, followed by a mischievous wink of a man who felt he will undoubtedly unlock and capture the secrets of an imperceptible world, with a mere press of a button.
there’s no bravado in it. just a innocent decision no different when a child makes when decide on what they want to be in life for the first time.
because if i can hold onto this—this small act of creation, this way of fixing something in place before it disappears—then maybe i can hold onto something of myself that hasn’t already been scattered beyond recognition. and if she’s there beside me while i do it—then i won’t say it feels like salvation. but if i can conjure a world that would see claudia happy, then i will be limitless in my drive to have that manifested for her.