Like a Bird, page 18
I stayed in the bluish water, swelling from the moment. Awakened, pulsating like a life-sized artery, the idea of his tongue moving through my crevices revived me. I felt sanctified like a Byzantine saint, and I was going to listen to my calling. Feeling this buzz, I got up and wrapped the towel around me with a dull fear. I half-heartedly slabbed on some Tahitian monoi body oil. I didn’t know where he was, but I was going to find him. I walked toward his bedroom and entered without an invitation, without a knock. He was standing near the window, present. He was my sexual nexus. I moved toward him unabashedly.
“Ky.”
He turned around and his eyes focused on mine. I pulled my towel off and stood there in front of him, a child of the sun, the limpid rays infusing me with power. I could feel my bones trembling. He held his breath.
“Ky.”
“Yes, Taylia.” I could hear it in his voice.
“I want you to…”
He came toward me fast and put his hand on my face. I knew he wanted to know, to make sure, that this—what we were about to do—was what I wanted before we did anything.
“You sure?”
I responded with absoluteness.
We looked at each other for eons before he sunk down and kissed me forcefully. He traced his tongue up my neck and jaw until he was back to my mouth. I felt his warmth envelop me as his tongue danced around mine for a millenia. He pushed me down onto the bed and brought his legs to mine, entwining them together. My hands went up his back that was suddenly bare, up his spine until it led me to his full head of hair, where I felt it move under my skin. He kissed me strongly on the mouth again, exploring every detail, then moved toward my pussy. There was a pause, and I was almost panting, suddenly hungry. I never wanted something as much as I wanted that. He felt perfect, just as I imagined, his tongue a dance, a slow, perfectly slimy beat. He sucked me like mango and got me so wet I could feel it drip down my thighs, sliding down to my crack. He stopped and raised himself onto his knees, suddenly regal, hovering above me. He opened me up, and my body followed him, and as our torsos met I felt him rising against me. He fumbled and found his way inside. Suddenly we were together, breathless. No hurt, no bruises. The provocation of my skin ruptured through my very fibers, but it was dazzling. I was seduced by his rhythms, by his mercurial disposition, as his eyes caught mine, filling me with longing. The animal in me was moving and dancing on my chest, a puppet on a string. The rush I felt squealed against my nerves with pleasure. Just slightly under full consciousness, I lay, being fucked and feeling no edge, no hurt. And I embraced him fully as I felt him again. It was more than I could bear. He surged into me, again and again, watching every bit of tension move through my eyes. Our legs, tangled, and his body gently moving in and out, swaying to the tide of time.
Truth is what you’ve experienced. It’s what you know. In the years of feeling unworthy of love I grew to believe that I was unlovable. My theories were proven and sustained by every bit of mistreatment I’d ever felt. Even Alyssa couldn’t do much to dissuade me. You’re overreacting, she would tell me. Code for: You’re exaggerating. That’s how people gaslight you. They do it in the subtlest of ways, making you doubt your intuition, your knowing. Alyssa had no desire to drive me insane, but sometimes, even I knew she wanted me to shut up and take it. I felt like sometimes even she was bored of me.
After everyone had gone to sleep, sometimes I’d stand in front of the bathroom mirror so long that my whole body would feel numb. Like when you’re out in the cold for too long and the feeling overtakes you so much that you can’t remember what it felt like to be warm. I’d trace my hands up my thighs and to my stomach. Je me dégoûte. I’d say it over and over again. I was afraid to say it in English, some part of me didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want the ghosts to hear me say it, and know it, and see it. I’d stand on the side and pull my stomach in as far as it would go. I reveled when I could see the lines of my rib cage, skin like cheesecloth being pulled over the edges of a rough surface. I was definitely bigger than the girls in the magazines. Dark hair shaded my lower back to my crack, and visible stretch marks bruised my hips like spiderwebs. I had big arms that stuck out and medium-sized, semiround tits that were set far apart from each other, giving them a disproportionate distance. How could anyone ever make love to this body? I felt that deeply, at that time, as my eyes lingered painfully on my tortured unappeal. I knew I would never be desired and loved simultaneously.
Ky was asleep when I woke, so I got up and walked to my room. Unsure of whether anyone could see me stark naked, I moved fast, trying to make no sound. I put on what was closest and plonked down onto the floor. It had happened, it had really happened. Life felt strangely intense, but positive. I looked down at my thighs and found them half unshaven and prickly. Out of laziness I often skipped shaving the backs of my legs or even large anonymous sections of the vast space of my thighs. I put my head to my hands. But shame couldn’t fester in my current state. My heartbeat felt large in all the places where the energy was suddenly pumping. I felt embraced by the universe, the furtive voices of my self-disdain weak in the moment. The blood in my face moved with a throbbing madness; the tiny blue vein in my left temple pulsed as I thought of that night in waves. That night, with its terror, was like an eruption.
I replayed my sulky, brutalized self, a close-up observation of my agony, as I lay opposite Simon, hoping to be saved even in that moment. In my replay, he was a body with an all-consuming pride. A deathly pallor with an aquiline nose and that deranged gray glare. The overture of the night rung on repeat. But, now, where was I? In this moment, I stood suddenly at the edges of my dreams, soaring. I couldn’t believe how the pendulum had swung. That I, a girl who could have felt that low, felt good, felt surreal, right now, right now. I got up and walked downstairs. I felt famished. Agitated, I was met in the kitchen with a pile of dirty dishes. So I started washing them, existing for a time in my thoughts.
“Taylia.”
I had not heard him come downstairs. He now stood behind me in the kitchen doorway. I had a soapy plate in my hands as he approached me.
He reached down and wiped a bit of foam off my dress, caressing me softly as he did so. I felt scared, anxious, momentarily unaware of myself again and of what to do next. I faced the other way so he couldn’t see the questions on my face. I felt him come up from behind. With one hand he took my wrist and turned me to him. Tracing my skin softly, he pressed himself against me. I don’t remember how we got upstairs.
Toward the end with Simon, I was bleeding under the loss of myself. And, for a split second there, I thought I saw the white light. Frankly, the notion of death, in that moment, seemed comforting. I had toyed with suicide for so much of my life, because anything had to be better than the life I had been dealt, even silence. Like that scene in Amélie where she thinks of all the people crying at her funeral, I felt sorry for myself, of course I did. So, dying felt like a solution, an absolution. As I looked toward the white light, my body bruised like a bashed-up fruit, my vagina blaring hot, hot heat, I felt myself transcend to a time so similar. Alyssa, I’m coming for you, I thought, as her breath was suddenly fixed in my pulse. I could feel her; in her moment of dying, she was all adrenaline. She was with me, even my blurred vision could tell. But then, all of a sudden, she was running toward her freedom. Without me.
White light, white light, white light.
I came back to myself. To Simon. But I was alive.
What surprised me about him the most was that he didn’t talk about his mother with contempt; he didn’t casually slip in how he dreamed of slaying her while she was on her knees after he’d stabbed her thirty-seven times across the top half of her body. Surely the violence that he had administered to me would be detectable in his voice or the linger of his sneer. There had to be signs. Like a smoker’s odor that always reeked through every perfume, the undernotes of tobacco lingering, there must be a way to sense terror in a man.
What was so shocking was that it was obvious, and I had always known he was a piece of shit. I had just pretended not to. Simon had an alchemical taste to his aura. The air tasted of steel when he was nearby, stale, like all the air around him trapped. I could see the violence in his eyes, like a glimmer. I just hadn’t properly intuited the depth of his ferocity. How was he able to hide the pitless and unappeasable psychopath that lay dormant within him? And was there something wrong with me that it took me so long to recognize it, but really—to fear it?
20.
Kat and I sat in a restaurant near her house in Fort Greene. Beats of music passed through us, sinking us back into our wooden chairs. We had closed the café early that day, deciding on curried rice with saffron and raisins, chakalaka, and mojitos. Kat brought me here, the walls covered with variegated maps of Africa and pop-style portraits of the madiba himself, Nelson Mandela. The guitars hummed while we devoured our food like starved animals, drinking the fresh sweet-and-sour slush that tasted like the booze of a crushed flower. Then we ordered some more, and more.
“I brought some tarot for you today, my sweet Taylia.”
I was drunkenly thrilled.
“Tarot—to be honest—should be the regular practice of ev-ory-bo-day.” She sang it, and I joined in. We were drunk.
“I feel you.”
“Are you ready for some spiritual praxis, hun?”
“Yes! I am!”
We were both definitely very drunk. She pulled the cards as we sang rhythmed oohs and aahs in response. “Page of Cups!” “Ace of Cups!” When the final card came, she placed it near my left arm and breathed in. “Two of Cups, all cups.” My fortune teller gasped, “A suit of all cups, all upright.” She paused. “This is quite something.”
“Is it?”
“Oh, yah, Tay.”
“Okay, okay, tell me!”
“Well, the cups represent emotionality, love… water signs…”
“I’m a Cancer!”
“Yeah, I know—wait, what’s Ky?”
“Fuck… I don’t know?”
“Okay, find that out, Taylia. Find that out!”
“Okay, okay.” My mouth twitched as I repeated, Ask Ky his birthday. Ask Ky his birthday, in my mind, blasting it through the coils of my memory center. “Please, what else?”
“Okay, this is all positive. Seriously.”
“For?”
“For lurvve, my baby.”
I was in a trance.
The sky was suddenly luminous, and the screech of cicadas rushed in the late summer heat. A man on a bike went past our window and I watched him zigzag, his safety light blinking like lightning. The moon shone through the park ahead of us and framed the silhouettes of the cars on the street. We were both distracted in unison.
I smiled. “Kat.”
“Yes, my love?”
“I feel happy.”
She fluttered her eyes, as if she were Samuel Morse himself, mimicking the tip tap tip tap tip tap of the first Morse code message. She was now quiet, aureoled—my darling friend. “You’re finally seeing what you have to offer this world, my love, and it’s pulling you out of your manic, er, cataclysm, or what have you.”
“I didn’t know… Honestly, I didn’t know that I could ever feel like this.”
“When you’re young everything feels impossible because they’re things you haven’t experienced before. Then, as you get older, you see that life is worth relishing, and sometimes there are patterns you can almost intuit. The noise dies down after a while, then maybe it picks up again… but sadness, these days, feels far, far away… Another drink?”
I nodded, slowly drifting.
“Just one more, right?”
We both grinned mischievously at each other.
It’d been more than a few months since Kat and Claudia had started dating, and there was an ease in Kat that I mirrored, well not entirely, but it was inspiring to see someone be so relaxed in love.
“Is the whole dating a woman thing hard?”
“Not entirely, like… there’s more emotional honesty than before. The sex… is different, maybe more intense than with men. She only dates women, so sometimes I’m worried that I’m disappointing her.”
“What? Impossible.”
“Girl, it’s been a transition. I don’t know why being with a woman feels so different, but it does. It feels more weighted, you know? Because this shorthand exists: she understands me better than all the rest, maybe because we’re similar. I don’t know, but I love her deeper, I feel more aligned with myself than I ever have before. I just feel this intensity consumes me all the time. I don’t know…” She slurred her last words. “Am I talking too much?” As confident as Kat could be, she had moments of self-consciousness, especially when she talked about Claudia. She was giddy, in love. It was sweet, we were both reflections of each other.
“Are you serious? This is all I want to talk about,” I assured her.
Kat smiled. “Being in love feels like such a feat.”
“You are in love…” It was confirmed.
Her eyes lit up brighter as she touched her right incisor with her tongue, a little cheeky. “Maybe.”
I watched the golden hour light move along her hands to mine, past my fingers. My body had always felt as if I were trying it on for size, never quite fitting, but now, beneath this honeyed glow that shone across us both, I felt full, thinking of love and its majesty. I grinned, seeing the light of the city change before us.
“How are you finding the job, by the way?” she asked. I liked how she controlled moods. It was her Capricorn nature, she steered things.
“It’s good… I don’t know if I’ll ever have the rapport that you have with the customers. I feel like some of them are bummed out when they see it’s me and not you at the counter.”
“Well, they can suck it!”
I howled. “No, but seriously, I mean it’s about them, but it’s also about you, about us, this community you are cultivating. It’s made me confront a lot of things about myself.”
“Like what?”
“Like my fear of being unlikable.”
“I think that’s a burden put on all women, Tay.”
“Really?”
She smirked.
“What?”
“Sometimes you feel so outta this world. Like, these things that are so simple…”
“You mean basic…”
“Yes.” She giggled mercilessly, and I shook my head.
“I mean, I feel naive… most of the time.”
“It’s a Taylia charm. Because then you’re not. Then all of a sudden it’s clear you’ve seen some shit. But, truthfully, I’ve never met a kid from New York like you, so you’re an anomaly.”
“I’m not soft…”
“No, you are not. But you’re you.”
“As are you!”
“We’re both unique… Also, is it just me, or does the air taste like champagne?”
We paused and took a moment. There was something about the sky. Just as I looked up toward it, a fleet of birds cuckawed above. There was a serenity to the moment that I didn’t want to lose. Something about it reminded me of Dadi-ma.
“You know, you’re really the first friend I’ve made since the death of my grandmother.”
There was a beat. Kat, with her unique brand of patience, didn’t say anything, almost stubbornly. I knew it annoyed her that she always had to cajole things out of me, and I was trying to be more accountable to my secrecy, to my fears, my anxious awkwardness. So I told her about Dadi-ma. About how this, our relationship, was one of sincere ease and something that I hadn’t experienced in my adult life, ever.
Kat told me about the girls she had grown up with in Brooklyn, told me stories of grief as well as stories of generosity and community. That spirit was palpable in everything she did. So she told me about her youth and how much she loved Brooklyn, how there’s a certain respect she had for Black people in Brooklyn.
“Honestly, if I could get something for Milk Thistle in BK, dude, are you effing kidding me? I’d get it in a heartbeat. Well, with the help of Ma, but you know, it’d be a worthy investment. The woman was born with a gift.” She scratched her chin, in super planning mode. “But, okay, imagine more seating. Imagine a bigger menu—as in not just drinks and pastries. I’m thinking sort of like a nine-to-four eatery, you know, like how the Australians do. Those Australian lunch menus… kimchi fried rice with an egg and shiitakes roasted in bacon fat… I just made that up, but just these elaborate, beautiful, luscious meals, pouring out with delicacy. I want this to just be good, like runny yolks on a chicken congee. I really want to play, I really want to maybe try and do the real cook thing.”
I was incredibly moved, seeing her in her element, when she was linking ideas, inspiration, movements together to create something different. This was an exceptional quality of Kat’s. There was a reason Milk Thistle had gotten prime real estate, for quite decent rent, in Manhattan—Kat was doing something invigorating. Yes, she served pastries as well as the highest-grade coffee—inspired by international baristas, using perfectly sourced, truly fair trade beans—but the space was also alive and Zen in a way. I could also see the vision clearly for her future Brooklyn outpost. She was dreaming, and I knew I had to ask her logistical questions to help harness the manifestation.
“Okay, what color walls?”
“A pale pink.”
“A garden?”
“Absolutely.”
“Ideal location?”
“Near the house. Are you kidding me?”
“Waffles?”
“Yeah, but, like, with buckwheat and a raspberry coulis… and crème fraîche.”
“Grits?”
“Yes, but more authentically Cajun with a vinegary avocado side salad to cut the creaminess of the grits.”
We continued the back and forth. Eventually tired by our visions, we sat silently, both looking out into the neighborhood. We both felt comfortable in our silences, a habit we had developed in the café, and I thought about how grateful I was for our connection, something that I believed was a true kinship. After a while she told me what was on her mind.
