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“I didn’t know. I didn’t even know I wasn’t happy. I was just walking around here and living. Thinking this was how things in life were supposed to be. It was like I was blind. And when he came ...”
“What? When he came what?”
“I could see things ...”
Evan turned from me and looked ahead again, crossing his arms over his chest.
“I still want you to come home,” he said so softly I could hardly hear him.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t do that.”
“Why?” He looked at me again. “Don’t you love me?”
“I’ll always love you. You’re my first love,” I said. “And you’ll never know how much I want to come home to you. To be with you and stay here forever and be happy. But I can’t. I just can’t do that after feeling what I’ve felt. And learning what being in love feels like. It’s not something I can just walk away from and pretend it never happened. Because it did and I’ll always have it with me. No matter how much I want to pretend.”
“But what about us?”
“I want you to find someone,” I said, crying as I took Evan’s hand into mine. He held his fist tight at first and then he loosened up. “I want you to find someone who can love you like you love me.”
Evan’s body jerked and he began to sob loudly over my cries as it became clear what I was saying.
“You deserve that. You deserve to know what it’s like to have someone love you like that.” I looked him in the eyes. “And it’s not me.”
We sat there in those plastic chairs crying and wiping each other’s tears until the sun outside the window set and the moon came in to have a look at us as it had so many nights in our bedroom. Looking at the moon through my tears, I admitted that in my heart I knew I’d lost something essential to my life that afternoon, but as much as it hurt, I had to let that something go.
Chapter Thirty-one
I was learning to crawl, to stand, to walk. And not in the way a baby does. Well, similarly, but for me, it was less like I was doing it the first time and more like I was relearning to do it as me.
Being at home in my parents’ house again, a welcoming womb where meals were served on time, it was always warm and everyone just seemed happy to see me each day, gave me the fresh start in Tuscaloosa I needed. I was brand new, not belonging to or being obliged to anything or anyone but myself. My days were my own and whatever new thing I wanted to discover was up to me. This freedom, this ability to see possibility in the world was what I’d craved when I left to be with Dame. It was what I’d felt in Africa and thought was completely impossible in Tuscaloosa, but living under the radar by choice, it was becoming more real than I’d expected. Yes, hurting Evan, walking out on my life and letting my family and church down did bring me pain in the beginning, but the reward, I was discovering, was so simple and sweet. I was free. I was eating what I wanted, when I wanted, and never thinking about how much weight might come with it. But then, I was also walking a lot. All around downtown, at the mall, the park, the river, just walking and looking at things for what they were. Not for how they could be used or what they could give to me, but for what they really, really were. And even when I met unhappy, judgmental faces that no doubt found some reason to still care about the news with me and Dame, I smiled and accepted their role in the controversy, the way they wanted to see me and the world—and it didn’t even matter, because I didn’t care how they felt. And after all that walking and not caring and eating what I wanted, I managed, somehow, to lose weight anyway. That was something.
But the best part of the freedom was the night. Being alone, with nothing to hold on to but myself and the moment, made my nights a spectacular show.
I had a routine. I’d come in from my closet/office at the church, eat dinner with my parents, put on a sundress, grab a glass of sweet tea and go, barefoot, out to see the sunset each night. Lying in a reclining sleeper or sometimes just out on a blanket I’d placed on the grass in the middle of the backyard, I’d wait for and watch the arrival of the moon like fireworks on the Fourth of July. While it didn’t crackle or pop, its shine, its incredible, luminous glow over every single thing it touched reminded me of how I felt when I was at my best in life. When I touched people and they leaned on me, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that I had something to give to the world. Like the moon, I was learning that I was magical. I was an eyeful. I was big and shiny and luminous just because I was me.
I fell asleep out there looking at the moon show most evenings and woke up sometimes in the middle of the night to my mother’s calls from the back door. I’d open my eyes, look back up into the sky to see that it was still there above me and then, with a pout, head indoors where I knew the moon would get a chance to elude me. The idea of this, somehow, always angered me now. I wanted to say it was because, right then, the moon seemed to be the only thing in the world that I could really connect with. But there was a secret to these nightly rendezvous.
I was still very, very angry with Dame for how he’d behaved, his selfishness and disregard for my feelings. And taking Kweku’s advice, I was trying my best not to even think of him. No matter what happened, or how it happened, I was lucky to get out of there unharmed and I had to keep my mind on getting myself better and living my life. But all of this was more easily advised than executed where my heart was concerned. And even in my
anger, my heart still somehow found a way to miss and think of Dame.
While I made it a point to focus on something else whenever a thought of him came to me, at night it seemed unavoidable. This had been his time. It had been our time together. I thought of this, remembered this, secretly and silently at night in my parents’ backyard when the evening breeze, still warm from the day, brushed past me and in smells from the river I found something that reminded me of the time I’d spent in Ghana. Of the night air there. And, in part, I knew this was why I’d stayed out there in the backyard for so long. Yes, the moon was luminous. Yes, I’d longed to just be alone. Yes, to all of the reasons I’d shared with my parents. But also, yes, to the point that being out there allowed me to feel connected in the universe, at least, in some way to Dame. In the black night, I saw his skin. In the stars, I saw his eyes. When the moon gleamed, I saw his smile, heard his laugh, and felt him near me.
Not a night had gone by where I didn’t try to see his face in the sky or hear his voice in the breeze. I didn’t look at pictures or videos or even listen to his music. None could do him justice. So this was the closest I could get to the real thing.
But this was a secret.
Ashley, whose mother volunteered her to help me with the files, and I were in the closet/office making scrap files of old photos, flyers, and letters from various conferences the church had sponsored over the years. Once we’d gotten most of the heavy organization into a decent order to go to the records keeper, we’d been left with all these piles of random things and Ashley suggested we make scrapbooks that could be put into my father’s library. It was a good, youthful idea and the more we made the files whole and filled with images of smiling faces and letters of praise from events dating back to the eighties, I knew it would be a hit.
“Oh, that was from one of the St. Valentine’s dances we used to have when I was a teenager,” I said, looking at a picture Ashley was holding, a picture of a group of girls dressed in long, white dresses. We were sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by piles of pictures.
“Y’all had Valentine’s dances?” Ashley asked, grinning and pointing to one of the girl’s jheri curl.
“Every year. The girls wore all white and the boys wore black and had to escort a girl their parents and Sunday School teacher picked out,” I said, remembering how every year Evan’s mother and my Sunday School teacher chose me for him.
“People chose your date?”
“I know; it sounds ancient. Right?” I answered. “And we hated it, too ... being fixed up by our parents! And the worst part was that none of us wanted to be embarrassed by not being selected by a parent or teacher. That was humiliating and most people started looking at the girls’ parents like they’d been raising a raccoon. So, even though you hated it, you had to act right at church the weeks leading up to the dance, so you’d be selected.”
