The things he noticed were most unseen.
As nature could detect the beauty in the unknown, his gaze amplified visions of a graceful mercy tucked beneath the shadows of a hooded figure. And that day he slept eyes wide open, embracing the flow of a current, mind tapping quick as a passing train. Floating on the edge, immersed in the mesmerization of Death’s fluidity.
Dreaming to be fluent in her serendipity, yet still cautious of the limits and wonders that bloom from the trilingualism of Death, life, and the Black reality. To know of his future, to exist beyond a medium was what he searched for and the closer he got to the silver lining the less glorious awareness became. Diluting his mind in the capacity of his mother’s ocean with every rebirth, still he could not drown that which was conditioned to swim. He felt the whispers of his ancestors calling to his skin, pulling him in and pushing him out with the tide. Water felt like his unspoken destiny, carrying both evil and good, he’d wade in shallows waiting for the chorus of Black men and women, singers of the past, to part the sea and reveal the graves of his own.
As the ocean smacked and beat against his calves, his body rocked with the heavy weight of seventeen years. On this day he had come into the world still, silent and in the mockery of an unexpressed beginning, his head remained forever bowed towards freedom. But in the ocean, he felt whole. He felt Africa’s coast. Almost as if the island was just out of reach, yet still dancing along the shore of belonging. Waiting for him, calling out to him to come home. He’d close his eyes and wait to become the raven he was in both nightmares and dreams. Dreaming of his mother, locked his feet in quicksand, praying to sink as she had done with him years before, this was the only place her spirit leaned on him, He could feel the weight of her broad shoulders pushing him deeper and deeper. She’d sing the hymns her mother had sung when she was just a child and tell him to swim. Swim away from the world that had stolen her from him. Swim and find her in the coral reefs, cascading in the deepest abyss, swaying in the aisles of outer space.
“Zachariah, we’re leaving. Zachariah?” - it was always him who I heard first, the only voice to paint the ocean red, and my body blue underneath his canvas.
“Zachariah, come on, Imma leave without you I swear.” Tyrone moved through the current like an underwater hurricane, gaining strength the further out into the unknown he traveled.
His hands wrapped smoothly around my hips and he rested his head on my shoulder, my mother fighting to keep hold.
“You hear me, Z?”
I let go.
“Yeah, I heard you, just thinking.” I held my breath in and waiting for him to exhale. He had come into my atmosphere, blurring the sun with the purple of his skin, pulling me away from my mother’s cocoon and back into the land of tears.
“Whatchu thinkin’ ‘bout?” How did he do it? So calm and unmoved by the tsunami foaming around us, it was ready to collapse with each intake, but he wouldn’t stop breathing. Control. How beautiful, how right it looked in the arms of a Black boy.
“Just thinkin...bout my mother I guess. Let’s go, I’m done now.”
--
“You be livin’ out in the stratosphere, I swear. Every time you go into that ocean, It’s like it just carries you away and all that's left is dust and bones. Just like that,...you’re gone.” Tyrone chuckled a bit.
“It freaks me out sometimes, got me thinking you just gone collapse into the waves and make me go out there and save yo ass. What you be thinking about when you out in that water, huh? Can’t just be your moms?” He was staring at me now, or not really at me, but inside, deeper. Soul. He was trying to figure out why it kept tryin to whisk me away.
Tyrone ain’t never got along with souls, he said he found strength in skin and muscles, skin and muscle is what keeps him alive. Soul ain't done nothin but bring pain and unforgiving loss.
“I told you, I just like the water. Feels good. Its like...I don’t know, just makes me feel good.”
He dropped the subject and we kept walking back towards the city.
--
“You ever thought about going to see your dad? I mean, he been writing you for what? Five years now.
Still, within his own mind had he ever pondered the trivial of such an existence. To grasp the concept of humanity is to emerge triumphant to your own shortcomings. So why was it that in the emergence of each righteous black boy was there the sacrifice of vulnerability. Could the black boy not experience the world to the same extent of his peers or was it that this life had not been built for him?
Questions of love and loss could not be found so easily. The world had not relinquished their right to shame and shun emotion from the being of a black body. And he was not to be familiar with feelings of joy and happiness without the vacuumed permanency of anger and drought. Doubt, of whether to live under the same title of white flesh.
Within the tomb of this black body was still a child.
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