silence

I have tried a few times to write about my last love(r). I have not yet found a mouth with which to tell. Two years have not created enough distance, maybe years alone don't. 

I only have suspicions and impulses - they refuse to birth words, not yet anyways. I want to blame it on race or class or my strange passage through the Cape Colony, or the time I frightened him because I was too black and too fast and I tapped him on the shoulder from behind outside my residence in Mowbray.  And his habit of locking the car doors upon sight of those men who have been selling flowers and beaded things on the corner of Paradise and Edinburgh for as long as I have known the corner of Paradise and Edinburgh. (They were brown and therefore dangerous, those men).

I think we never learned to understand together that I am Black and he is White and we have histories we didn’t create and they are written all over our bodies and read out loud every time a waiter puts the bill folder on his side of the table.

instead, we layered silence upon silence upon silence. until we Exploded.