I
I recognized the back of that head as one belonging to someone I would love before she even turned around. Everything else felt frivolous then. The job, the wife, my mother, who was waiting for me outside.

“Excuse me?” I asked. “Do you have the time?”

“Sure,” Sol said, though I didn’t know her name yet. It was obvious I was flirting, we all had phones. She had a girlfriend and I, a wife, but I asked to know her anyway. She said yes, despite. We exchanged numbers and she—more measured than I—made me promise not to speak to each other again. Not until we were free of the things holding us down.

I was there to buy condensed milk and apples but I left convinced I was ready to ruin my life.

I called that night. She answered. I hid in the bathroom to talk to her, my ass cold on the tub’s lip, my toes curled over the toilet bowl rim. She told me about the music she liked to listen to: Alice Coltrane, Kelela, A Tribe Called Quest. Anything that pushed against the boundaries of form. Lenny Kravitz, too. He was her father’s favorite. I asked her if she looked like him and she said they couldn’t be more different. He was big where she was small. Her nose was flat and wide where his was sharp and thin. His laugh was a waterfall, dribbling from his mouth while hers started in the back of her throat and climbed its way out. She looked and laughed just like her mother, she said, who hated her because she hated herself.

“Well,” Sol said, “it’s like this: I know she loves me. But I don’t feel it. You know Black girls and their moms.”

I did because I’d forgotten the apples and had to listen for blocks to an acidic tirade about how I was a stupid girl even though I was grown and had paid because my mother couldn’t afford groceries. But who has the money doesn’t have the power, I learned that early. With the ease and quickness of a glare, she could make me small, even though I’d spent my life searching for ways to gain height.

I married a woman like my mother, though she came in a different package. They look like they hatched from two different worlds, but deep down they’re made of the same stuff. My wife hid behind the money and the charm and the servile attitude, posturing that everything she did was for me. I knew better. I could feel the way she looked at me when I dared to exist in the ways she hadn’t expected me to. When I rose up high.

II
The next morning I FaceTimed my best friend, June. We’d despised each other at first, June and I, for no reason other than wanting to be friends and not knowing how. I thought that she thought she was smarter than everyone else. Which was true. (As in: she did think so and she was.) She thought that I was too loud and too opinionated. Also true. (As in: I had ideas about everything and everyone, based mostly on how they made me feel.) I felt God was real because I’d seen my aunt give birth to my sister-cousin and even though I wasn’t supposed to I peeked between her legs and saw a galaxy in there. As above, so below, or whatever. I recoiled from politics because I thought everyone was crooked but believed that everybody should eat but also didn’t want to do anything to make that true. At dinner parties I provoked people because I could. Five years ago, I’d provoked June and she beat me back with straight facts because like I said she was smart, but she preferred to hide that so people didn’t feel she was so different from them. She wanted to fit in. I knew that I was like everybody else and needed to stand out. It worked. We worked.

I told her about Sol and she closed her eyes all sage-like. “What are you gonna do about Blue?”

III
I started fucking Sol while I was still married to Blue and told June I was doing it. She played nice with my nonsense and said whatever makes you happy because she knew if she said anything else I’d defend Sol like I was defending myself and never tell her anything again. Fucking Sol made me mean. I had so much rage all the time. Angry because I loved her and she belonged to someone else. Angry because I felt so far from myself. Angry because I was pretending inside my own life. And then one day, it broke open and the river mouth swallowed us whole.

There was a video. Sol and I, holding hands, kissing. A man on the street took it in an innocuous attempt to capture love in New York not knowing he was remaking the landscape of my life by force. He posted it and it caught fire, spreading across the internet as people learned it was me. Suddenly I was a person who had transgressed instead of myself. Someone to project fears onto. Someone to spit on and step over and use as a shield. Someone to spin as a cautionary tale, a remember-when for girls chatting at brunch and during long phone calls when they had nothing else to talk about. June and I had done that, dissected the lives of women we believed we could never be. Now I was one of them, fallen, falling, falling.

IV
When Sol found out, she rented us a room in a hotel upstate. It was womb-like. Brown, everywhere. We drew the shades even though we knew no one was looking for us. Everyone is bolder in the digital universe, less so in the real. On the eighth day, I had become radioactive. I didn’t think I deserved anything so I started fighting Sol with everything I had. She was loving me. I was scared. She was reminding me of who I was. I called her everything I wanted to call myself. My phone rang incessantly. People who knew me and Blue calling, calling, calling.

I was once a person with principles. Had built a life on the moral high ground. The day I met Sol, I realized that the life I’d cultivated—one with soft beds and paintings taller than me and imported furniture and clothes that felt nice underneath my palm—had rendered me inert, insulated me from myself, stripped me of want and put a performance in its place. I had grown comfortable in a life that looked impeccable but felt like a series of hallways, each leading to another silly preoccupation incapable of filling me up. I looked like someone who should have something to say and yet I would open my mouth and fickle things would come out. Sol was different. She had died a dozen times and come back more herself every time.

On the ninth day we fought about what to do next. I wanted to find a real life on the other side of expectation. Sol wanted to return, hand in hand. I couldn’t tell if I was the things I did or the person I believed myself to be. Sol said I was all of it. I asked if I was good and she said it didn’t matter. I was telling the truth now, finally. I asked her what would happen if I did this again. Fell in love with someone else. “Then a new thing will be true,” she said. That she handled me like I couldn’t hurt her infuriated me. I hated that she was unafraid when I was so terrified. Certain where I was grasping for understanding.

V
The next day, June sent for me and I went. I met her at the water. She came with her hair tied up and I asked if she was protecting her energy. June had a Good Life. A carefully arranged life. A spherical one. A life without serrated edges. She was pregnant again and superstitious so when we got to the nearby lake I couldn’t touch her and she didn’t look me in the eye, which didn’t matter anyway ‘cause she could see me without looking.

“You’re passing through something,” she said.

“And who will I be when I get there?” I asked myself and her and the water. No one answered but I felt something growing. I couldn’t tell if it was ancient or infinite.

“You made the kind of choice that started somewhere deep and clawed its way out of you. Surprised you. Scared you,” June said. “You’ve always been good at knowing. You’ve spent so much time trying to know so you can survive. If anything you need to do the opposite now. Unknow so you can be more honest more often, so you can have a life you actually want to be inside of.”

“I do,” I replied. “But it’s coming so fast. I can’t hold it all at once. It feels so slippery.”

“I’m telling you to trust yourself. Learn to stop recoiling from your instincts. They’re trying to tell you something and you, me, Sol, everyone who loves you, hell, even Blue: we all need you to listen.”

At the mention of Blue’s name, I wanted to wade into the water and never come out.

“I’m here,” she said. “Right now and on the other side.”

I left June and walked the mile back to the hotel, thinking all the way. I could get my old life back if I tried hard enough. If I tamped the alarm ringing inside me. But then I couldn’t shake the sense that I could also free myself if I wanted to, that all I had to do was follow myself all the way down. The cost of being a free woman is high, though. I know this because I’ve never seen one in real life. On that walk back, I was wholly unsure I could pay it. When I opened the door to the hotel room and saw Sol lying there, eyes closed, her head tilted toward the sun, I knew—wholly—I had no other choice.

Afterword

I think most things in life can be boiled down to the intimate relationships between people, most often women. And not that that makes it simple. If anything it’s the opposite—it’s the most complex, the most epic, the most spiritual. In sum, I stay in women’s business, personally and professionally, so aesthetically I was immediately drawn to what Naudline Pierre was putting on canvas: scores of Black women as I see them … eternal and central. I was drawn to the vivid and arresting colors, to the winged figures in various figurations—climbing, laying, witnessing … In her work, I felt that our business was being taken seriously.

I chose Affection and Protection (2020) because I was interested in the cacophony of voices. There were the people in the clouds, silent, watchful. Then the figures in the water, one covering the other. I wondered about whether the figure on top would protect the woman beneath her if she fell as I’m also endlessly enthralled by the fall. A while ago, I went to a talk between Camille Bacon and the artist Turiya Adkins. They spoke about the mythology of Icarus and Daedalus and the sensuality of the descent. The fall, they said, can be as instructive as the ascent. I thought about that as I gazed at that purple figure in Naudline’s painting, her wing grazing the water, wondering what she’d done to find herself on the proverbial ground, eyes closed, covered by this woman emitting light. I wrote this story to find out.