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You drown. This is how it begins.
You ride a wagon, chained to others. You're carried off by a man who will keep your true name behind his back for far too long. You meet a boy who steals your heart.
You end up in the forest, alone. You walk. You live. You find other bodies, other lives, while the hole in you continues to gape. You meet the ancestors one day, and the ghosts of the future.
You remember the first marriage, the symbols drawn on your face. You remember the first time, and the second. You wait, the two of you, and as time passes begin to grow impatient.
The mother of the one you love promised you a time that belonged to you, once. The time here is perhaps not that.
But you can't wait anymore.
You are a child tottering across the daycare floor, small and fragile. You are thirsty, even though your mama gave you water to drink before she drove you off, sniffling a little when she thought you weren't looking. You twisted your hands in your lap, uncomfortable in the seatbelt's restraint, and couldn't manage to mention your thirst.
You are a strange child, although you don't know that yet. You think everyone wakes up screaming from memories of water and fire, the crack of a whip ringing in their ears. You think everyone flinches at the sight of a redhead woman, you think everyone can look at the horses pacing by and mutter about proper stabling and a feeding in a way most men don't even remember.
When you are grown, you'll look back and feel sorry about the trouble you caused your parents, the anxious whispers in front of your bedroom door. You'll wish to be normal, that they wouldn't have so much to worry about on top of school and other children and the endless shadow of the police.
Right here, right now, though, you are thirsty. And you're looking for something you're not sure you'll find.
You find him sprawled on his tummy over a picture book. He looks up at you and you come to a stop, unconcerned by the other kids passing by you. His skin is so black it's purple, and his eyes are sharp enough to hurt.
It dawns on you that you're not thirsty anymore.
His name is Samuel, and he refuses to let anyone call him Sam or Sammy. Your name is Kayode, a name your parents got from a book about a place they'd never been, but that all three of you dream about. You'll tell him that it means "he brings joy" later on, in a language you sometimes imagine you can still speak.
You enunciate it for him, highlighting the "KUH" so he won't mispronounce it the way the daycare lady did (the first of many). He calls you Day, and he's the only one allowed to. You like the word Day, find it a kinder reflection of an old name, but it belongs to him. Your nickname has always belonged to him, too.
From that first day, you are inseparable. You share everything, and maybe that's how you get away with knowing things about each other without quite having to ask.
Later on, you meet his mother. Her name's Maggie and she's a tall woman, with dark hair spilling down her straight back. You look at her and you know her, and she knows you. It's a bit like the feeling you've around Puah and Essie, two of your classmates.
It frightens you, the knowing. When you do manage to speak to her, you keep saying "Miss Maggie" instead of her proper name. She lets you get away with it and slowly you get more comfortable with her, wolfing down her food as eagerly as your own mother's.
You don't feel that way around his father, Ayo, but when you see them together you feel that something has been fixed in the world, something small after so much loss.
You grow. On the basketball court you're a perfect duo, coordinating every toss and throw without sharing a word. It's like you know where he'll be before he does.
When you're older the dreams aren't as frequent, but they still come. You end up telling them to him instead of your parents. He'll scoff, say they're just dreams, but sometimes he'll look around a few seconds before muttering about the shadows he sees sometimes, the faces who are his and not.
His mother tells him it's a gift, the power of visions. He tries to laugh it off, but he's never been able to lie to you. You don't say anything about it; it's not your way.
You tell him other things. You tell him that you hate the church your grandparents sometimes take you to, that the prayer and the singing and the talking make you feel anxious. You tell him that you hate the name your grandparents called you, Isaiah, the ones they insisted on having you baptized under even though it says Kayode on your birth certificate. You take about hugging yourself, running your hands over your back as far you can and feeling for marks that aren't there.
Hearing the name, the prayers, it makes your stomach go tight and your breathing strained. You'll hear the cracking of the whip and the creak of chains, the things that usually stay in your dreams. Isaiah will make you stiffen if you're not prepared for it, like a splash of cold water in your face.
The white men whose picture hangs under the cross frightens you, as badly as the white men in uniform on the street. You tell this to him as you sit on benches or pace the empty court together and he doesn't say anything, just nods with understanding.
When you're ten, you throw up on the priest at your First Communion.
You don't remember much of it, to be honest. You remember your legs going stiff and locking up, you remember the roar of fire in your ears, you remember trees swaying from the shadows where they shouldn't be trees and bodies in the branches when the bodies are supposed to be long gone.
Then there was a weight on your back, something heavy and cruel that they wanted you to drag, the weight of the people who were supposed to be your family piled on. You couldn't take it, not even with him by your side. It reopened wounds you didn't even know you had, and it hurt, and the shockwave tore through you.
Your grandmother said later she thought you were possessed by the Spirit at first. But you've never heard of anyone tossing their cookies when they're touched, even that seems like the sort of thing that should happen when in contact with a deity, if you think about it. The priest certainly didn't seem prepared, judging by their noise he made
People say you ran down the aisle, with a speed that would make any gym teacher proud, clearing the doors just in time to retch some more over the church steps. You sprinted away into the streets, running running running, concrete skittering under your feet as you tried not to fall off the world. When you finally collapsed, you didn't know where you were.
No one really knows who brought you back, to where your parents had finally shown after someone called them. All you remember are a tender hand in yours, a soft voice asking if you wanted help getting home, eyes that seemed to know you from somewhere. Your grandparents say it was a man in a dress, but one of the other parishioners mentioned that she called herself Emma.
Your parents take you home. There are quiet conversations about what had happened, what you had seen, and you finally tell them how the church makes you feel. Turns out they didn't know your grandparents still called you Isaiah, and there's a lot of yelling on the phone.
Samuel laughs so hard when you tell him. "Wisha I could seen it, Day," he says. "'Woulda given the whole fuckin' world to have been there." You find yourself laughing along; he does that to you.
In the end, you end giving the priest a note of apology. You don't go back to church much after that.
Thirteen is a strange year. Samuel is getting bigger, filling out, and you find it hard to take your eyes off of him. You look at his shadow, brushing against yours as you walk to class (in pairs, hands down, watching for the cops) and it stirs something inside you.
It stirs other things in other people. Whispers. Rumors. The fact is that while you manage to befriend girls, neither of you does anything that can be mistaken for romance. There is a difference about you and Samuel, and maybe some other kids too, but you're worse at hiding it. Some girls recognize that and feel safer around you, smile more easily. Others join the boys with their harsh whispers.
Someone punches Samuel in the changing room, says he was looking where he shouldn't have. You help pry them apart and practically have to sit on Samuel, he's so spitting mad. They're both suspended for three days, and you bring Samuel his homework and try to get him to do it.
But before that, there is a moment in the bathroom, washing the blood off his knuckles, when your hands touch. You've touched before, of course, in the midst of passing or play-wrestling, but this is different, this sends something electric up through your bones.
You look at each other, and Samuel looks away first. He rushes his hands quick, even if they're still dirty under the nails, and leaves before you have breath enough to call his name.
That night, you go to bed feeling anxious and unhappy. Something should have happened that didn't, and you don't know what to do now.
Samuel is not like you. He walks down the street, defiant in the face of cops, bold to the point of rude whenever someone looks at him wrong. Whenever the two of you get near a white person you find yourself on tenterhooks, praying something bad won't happen. He's been patted down twice, and both times you nearly had an heart attack out of anger and fear.
"Soft," he calls you in his wilder moments, and maybe you are. You wonder whether you would be the same if he had your dreams, dreams of fire and blood and the embrace of oceans and rivers, or maybe it wouldn't change a thing. Maybe it's buried in him.
Samuel is a born fighter, a rebel. He squabbles with the teachers about the people left out of your textbooks, taking detentions and demerits with pride--although he also lets you drag him through assignment after assignment, because you can keep him on task like you no one else. He puffs his chest at any who leers or looms over you in the way home, and he never seems to feel your fear.
But Samuel is afraid in other ways. Samuel pulls away from your touch, sometimes, if you get too close in front of other people. Samuel can face five boys down without flinching, but a certain type of slur can make his hand shake, if only for a heartbeat. This, you think, is buried in him too.
You look at the Christian youth groups, the pastors on TV, the movies filled with the shallow, fluttering white gay boys that everybody's supposed to laugh at, and does. You look at cops, representations of a wicked old thing with a new hate, then you think about the things Samuel fears and wonder if the hate he's grown up with hasn't gone through a change of its own.
But when you're alone he lets you prop your head on his shoulder, or curl up under his jacket, and you know the fear is not unbreakable. And if you have to take things slow, you can do that.
At fourteen you're forced into an awkward pair with a girl named Essie at the dance, but all you ever manage to do is share a few giggles. A girl named Puah hits on Samuel more than once, her presence making you unusually tense, but it never goes anywhere and pretty soon she'll give up.
The four of you become friends, of a sort. There's something you recognize about them, a certain kind of knowing.
It's in Puah's poem about swimming across rivers, about ducking into dark water full of ghosts and trying not choke on the scent of ashes in her nose (you remember those). It's in Essie's impassioned speech about abortion rights to a Christian Youth member, until she's almost in tears and rumors start spreading.
You believe Essie when she tells you her dream about a ghostly white baby clinging to her side, tearing into her skin. She believes you when you talk about the painful, ugly, creak of wagon wheels, the sense of blood spurting on skin you logically know as smooth. All three of you believe Samuel
And you believe Puah when she talks about being born, or perhaps reborn, in the wrong body. No matter what the kids or her mom says, you know who she is.
Being a woman can be dangerous--she knows, she's been one before--but it's a role that she would only hurt herself ignoring. The name "Puah" sounds familiar to her, so that's what she's using right now, although she thinks she'll takes a new one when she finds a one to fit her.
Sometimes, when your parents are at work, the four of you hang out at Maggie's. On occasion Puah will wander into the kitchen with Maggie and they'll talk about things that neither of them should be able to remember, things about plants and circles and old names that are not for your ears.
The past haunts you, you know. Whether cruel or kind, it is there.
At sixteen you see Sarah-from-down-the-hall kissing Mary, a girl in her class, hands entwined in each other's hair. You watch them go out together, hand in hand. It's something you've only ever heard whispers about made real, and it strikes something in you. Not new, although some people might call it that, but rather very, very old. Perhaps even older than the god who condemned it.
You ask them about where they go. You beg, and eventually they let you visit a club, although they make it very clear you're not to go anywhere near the alcohol. You find yourself surrounded by people who look like you, talk like you, but dance in a way you didn't think was possible, eyes bright with a joy to rival anything you've seen in church.
You wonder if you would dare to take Samuel here. The thought makes your stomach twist with hope and fear
You look around, and suddenly you remember a place of safety just like this one. You remember the gentle sounds of the animals, the sweet whisper of hay, the steady walls keeping the two of you safe from the world.
And you remember how easily it crumbled.
Sarah finds you shaking in the bathroom, arms wrapped around your knees, sobbing about death and torture and rape and the toubab, a name for white people that you didn't even know you knew. "We were supposed to be safe," you hear yourself whimper. "We were, we were, we were...."
You look at Sarah's eyes and you see that knowing, that connection. Mary, too, in her own way. They pull you into a hug and whisper soothing things to you as they help get you home.
You remember things that you missed in your second life, and you briefly wonder if there's a point to the talk of holy trinities, but you suspect it's just random. You remember the day the gate fell and your tribe was torn apart. You remember the ocean swallowing you up.
You remember the monsters who came into your barn, one into another, with lust and lies and cruelty, with clinking chains and poisonous faith. You remember losing him not once, but twice. You remember how long it took to put yourself back together, as best you could, the life you did your best to live with others. You remember wanting more.
"Why did we come back?" you ask Sarah sleepily as you lie with her head pillowed on her arm as Mary dries you both home. "It hurts so much."
"Because people were starting to remember," she replies. "And we didn't want to risk them forgetting again."
You sit on your bed in the dark when you get home. You think about fear, about loss, about death. You think about the prison looming over all your heads, a place that's barely above the bloodsoaked fields of your dreams. You think about the churches, the ones that offer solidarity in some fights and threaten to tear everything apart in others.
You think about the wasted years, the endless misery, the souls left too battered to return, or unable to cross the gap by a universe's cruel law. You don't know how many of you returnees are there, really; you worry that the only reasons you found the ones you did is that you gravitate towards each other.
You think about the many who stayed with the ancestors, whose numbers swell with every new injustice, every shooting or execution. You think about the scars left by the toubab, deep and inescapable. You think about those who have lived less than you and die every year, to return or not, you don't know.
You think, too, about your parents, about Ayo and Maggie, about Mary and Sarah. You think about what it means to chase someone across centuries and oceans, to live and die again and again until you've got it right.
You think of Samuel's eyes, his heart, his unbreakable courage. You think of his body that you have know, and starting to know, better than your own. You think of how much it hurt to lose him the last time, and the time before that, when you Kosii and Elewa, life-bound guardians of the gate (you want to keep those names, attach them to yours somehow).
You remember the pain, and sweetness, of your lives. You look at your hands and balance the scales.
You make a decision.
You find Samuel sitting out back behind a school dance. You sit behind him and the two of you talk, compare shadows and dreams. "I saw one that looked like Mom," he says. "And another that looked like me, if I was older." He hugs himself. "And then I thought I was burning....and then I woke up."
He looks over at you. "And then we were by the river, the two of us, and I couldn't stay. I had a secret to tell you and I was afraid I was gonna lose it." He glances back down at his feet.
"I dream of you, Samuel," you say before you can stop yourself, offering up something you've held secret for so long. "I dream of you hurting, I dream of you lost, I dream of you dead. And I dream of you happy, I dream of you free, I dream of you laughing."
Your hand reaches out for his, and this time he doesn't pull away. Instead he stays perfectly still, staring at the shadows.
"What do you see?" you ask. He shrugs.
"It'd be dangerous," he says, after a minute. "Everyone'll turn against us." Again hovers between you in the nighttime, danger and charged.
"Not everyone," you say.
"Enough."
"We've got ground to fight on, for. Ground to fight on, and weapons of our own, for the first time in forever." Once you had space, and then we lost it. Once you had reached for weapons, or Samuel did, and then we lost them. The third time, you have weapons for words. You have memories, and the power to use them. You don't if you'll win, but at least you're not so sure you'll lose.
You don't say that. You don't need to. He knows you so well.
He's turning to you, and you look into each other's eyes. "I remember," he whispers. "Sometimes I don't want to, and sometimes I do, but it doesn't matter." He bumps his head against yours.
You've fallen, the two of you, so many times before. And yet you ended up here, because something keeps you going. Something deeper than time, space, or a white man's chain.
The pain of losing him will never quite fade. But that doesn't mean you can't have him back.
You turn to face him, your eyes meeting again. It has been centuries since your last kiss.
His lips taste just the same.
Hello, hello.
Welcome home.
I've missed you.
And for a little while, neither of you are scared.