I am trying to slow down time, climb back Inside. It’s Friday afternoon—rainfall steady against the gray. On my wall in West Philadelphia, her words in small letters read:
Trust me, you are beautiful even when you are alone, and you cannot see It. Trust me, you can dance. Trust me, you will laugh one day after move your body under the rain, feeling free. Feeling light. Trust me I will be there, even If you don't see me. I will stay. Thank you for stay, thanks for leave, thanks for your darkness, thanks for your light.
Naomi was ocean breeze inland, open sky. I started at her eyes. When I met her: walking down a market by the canal in a Berlin summer, my thighs thicking together lustlike, my body foreign, my desires handlebar and pedal-pushed, my name a new sound in every smile. I remember walking through those stalls feeling suntrimmed and special, hearing languages musiced by my not-knowing, my not knowing a small rope I kept tying and untying as the days went by in a city I had arrived to by light.
She sat behind a jewelry stand, spinning gold into strangers' ears, holding up a mirror from which I ate pieces of the sky. Looking was a taking, then. Sometimes, in my silent aloneness or newness there, it was the only way to feel among. I remember lingering long on each necklace, pendant and pearl. Smokestrung, open, I waited for her customers to take our leave, hearing only her voice, lilted with miles, punctuated by beads.
Naomi was a dancer. She told me she needed to write. I told her I need to dance. I asked what she has faith in, and she said Connection. Fields of trees. Bark and honey in her eyes. So magnet. Beautiful woman, she said, and her I believed. Weeks later, green and blue. I gave her my sandals so she could swim at the dock, fish among ships, the city braided into beauty, sharing its stage. The places we would go from there. Dipping in and out of water, drinking the sun. We fell towards each other with a certain kind of music, the summer becoming a soundtrack behind us. I remember searching for her at the train station, waves of bodies moving up and down the stairs, old women in hijabs selling fruit under tarp; locking my bike against the railing and looking out into the crowd, learning what to recognize her by.
In her words: Spanish mountains, oceans, and birds. We pedaled to the lake hooded by trees. Lying on the sand in my bralette that she called so beautiful I said, Yes, it's so comfy and she said Come on, it's not just comfy, it's sexy. She had a way of doing that: making my mirror sparkle, blushing all the bulbs. In the water, with my disposable camera, sun falling stripes on her hair, her shoulders, her breasts bare and doubled upon the water, my breasts bare and feeling a freedom like that for the very first time. Dogs on the shore, ankle deep and yipping the air. Even the wind was galloping then, my heart heavy-hooved and levity at the same time. We napped on the sand. We dangled grapes into laughing mouths- our own. The distance of touch the only distance between us. Peaches at the summit of their smiles. The dogs sniffing our feet, eyes love-buoyed.
Rarely, I think, do we get to find what we found together. Nothing was written: no expectation, prediction, blueprint or answer— just the questions pulsing, wagging their tails, moving moment to moment, sharing time. We climbed inside that clock together, pedaling our bikes, spooling our hair in Berlin’s summer air. I wanted to get to know her and it changed the colour of the light: Naomi at my poetry show in a blue velvet dress whispering against my ear I wore this for you. Naomi, leaning, waiting for me at the balcony bar after weeks of being gone, after not knowing how to stay. How I sneaked up on her, and her gasping, grasping, hugging me then saying that was like a movie, it was like a movie. It was all like a movie, the light slowing in the sky, moon hanging full. I remember riding through Treptower Park after the open air cinema, her on the backseat of my yellow bicycle trying to keep balance, laughing, warming her fingers under my thighs, laughing: a memory of miles.
Some people that people my life as trees the forest, as leaves the trees, as sun the colour green: I could never translate them enough, could never whittle the days into sentences, every minute a story languagable by hours, everything we said to each other disappearing into air, lingering in shadow, in time’s thick fog lacing the rearview, spitting back a reflection blurred by everything that came next. Love wipes the glass. Some lucky moments open up the clock, part the journey's thickened clouds, let light fall upon the feeling, even if not the detail, the exact words; even if I can only imagine and not remember her eyes, I carry their gaze. Their gaze on her last night in Berlin, sitting across from me at a sidewalk table with a beer In her hands, saying, I know I won't lose you. I'll come to find you. I'll come to find you. Trust me, you can dance.
