His skin was warm. Every touch, given with full thought and intention, didn’t leave time to question if this was okay. It could only be us and only in this instant, it felt as though, there was potential to exist in the multiplicity of moments. Each of them, existing in his eyes, his lips. Surpassing the plural dimensions of Black boy camaraderie, this was love. He cherished the body beneath him and the boy attached to it’s frame. The tips of his fingers soft and cool against my collarbone, the revelation of affection through mode of homage.
The experience was more than beauty could clench. There was art in coming as we were, all flaws and fear of what lived outside these walls. Acceptance, understanding, and nourishment of the emotions emerging from a world where we are subdued. In the world, black boys born as violet stars slowly dimmed into violent shadows of silenced flames. I embraced the wounds that would not heal and the scars that could never become beautiful things. Because we can not all define resilience and because some trauma will always be defiant against remedy. Because sometimes we are weak, sometimes we can’t overcome, sometimes we succumb completely. But, we’re never wrong in our openness towards vulnerability.
This world, full with rage and regret, will continue the tradition of torchered to tormentor with the influx of hope in every dark child but we move with the tides as we should. Accepting life in the form we are given, we move with the Sun, cracking sky along night and day, taking with us gracious gasps of air exempt from ownership. We could see the whole galaxy from out there. Floating in a cool breeze from Venus to Mars, there was no need to define what this was. It just was and it was okay.
And There were always shades of Brown that were never meant to be beautiful. While in rapture, he could find them in me. Our existence tarnished lies we were told as children. A time when our toes were still chained to gravity and history books could trample Cleopatra with a language not innate to us, semantically dousing our people with the salt of an ocean crippled by the capacity of our Black ancestors dusting along sanded floors made to be concrete. Oceans we could never plight set under another man's sun. They said we'd find our light on the moon.
So, every night became day and our blackness became synonymous with what could only be viewed as a purposeful rebellion against hues unlayered. (unaltered) Suddenly, beauty became complex in definition and image
Still my mind grapples with a gentle love, a requited love new to my bones I feel them shatter under his gaze. A brotherhood accessed through midnight love making. I envied days left for him to walk alone and envisioned my torso layered across his own. But the darkness before dawn was ours and ours alone. Through each other we ascended the heavens and earths surrounding us. Our movements unwaverable as we reached for the moon, taking specks of dust unchallenged in a vast universe. And when day break and bleak returned so did we.
We disarmed our eyes, our skin, our tongues. Seas which had been the casket for our ancestors now wash away the apocalypse of Black self-perception. Descendants rising with the current, soaking absorbed and absolved of roots tied to shackles. A people no longer left to drown, riding on the backs of whales, salt dissolving oceans of the past. There was a new day coming, one which carried a light for all.
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