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Do not trust women who were never bestowed improperly
Have not been lost from home
Do not trust their love
It’s empty
They have not felt the want of men who are not wrapped in an ideal of masculinity 
Nor men who fall in love quickly and remained
and chose you still

She has not cried for another sunset more beautiful than hers and still built her home on this street

My father hates white people
In his house are many rooms
I fucked a white girl in one of them

Your unbroken discharging into me precipitated writings I can’t stand to read
Others found them tragically beautiful
So I unfastened myself

Frozen. I stood there watching her dance. Watching her move like an unmanned kite swooping low in a hurricane. I was 7 again, watching National Geographic, wondering how African women conveyed their bodies like helixes. 

She walked by, face so close I could feel her breath on my eyelashes. A deep breath, full lungs, drowning in her tang. It was everything that happened in that moment. 

To You (Because I came so close to sacrificing my inner freedoms for you) �

The hardest part of this is not us not being together. That much I’ve learned to deal with from the many dissolutions behind me. It’s knowing everything has become undone. You’ve come undone and you’ve become fine with that.

You found a man to love you like your mama loves your daddy, like your brother loves that girl that doesn’t love him in return, like you wanted me to love you. He loves you for who you are. It’s what you’ve wanted since you were 13 because it sounded amazing when Carrie Bradshaw preached it, and in every book aimed at girls that age and older. He loves the you you were before I came along to fuck you up; before I came along and had you sitting on stairs outside at 3am, scattering stories about emotional moments in a land far away with your best friends, what you love most about the room you left behind in that house your daddy built on that old country road, and your real dreams, not those dreams you’ve been sharing with people since college graduation. He loves you, and I love that. You look happy when you’re loved, and although I never see your face anymore, I’m sure it’s still just as pretty.

I couldn’t love you for who you are because you showed me who you truly wanted to be, and I loved her more. I rooted for her, and I fought for her harder. 

I gave you that pill to bring her out, and sadly, I sat there and watched you riot. Fearful, you fought her. I was scared to. Did I tell you that? I was never able to tell you I hoped you lost that fight. The woman I met on the stairs that night was happier, and her eyes were bigger when they looked at new things. She ran down her fantasies, gave birth to ideas, and wrote poetry fit for shelves. Her walk was swift and she slept with her legs twisted around me like some sort of noose. She spoke with intention and finished all her cereal. She was lovely, and damn, she was mine. I loved her and was unsure how to love you anymore. That’s what happened to us.

I say all that in case you ever sit and listen to him tell you how much he never wants to change you because he loves you “just the way you are� and you wonder what I’m doing and why we didn’t work.

Just a few days ago in Los Angeles, I sat across the table from a pretty girl, Jane, in a Spanish-influenced Diane von Furstenberg talking about dating, loving, music, money and why the plate in front of her held her first tuna melt. She cursed a lot, and ordered whiskey straight. She was absurd, but too beautiful to be told such things, and too wild to really give a fuck what I thought. Her nose is perfect for the nose ring all the imperfect noses are now wearing, but she hates any piercings in the face, and she hates men who send unsolicited selfies.

“What’s the best date you’ve ever had,� she asked. Knowing this answer would require a few moments of memory surfing, reckless eyeballing around the café, and a few unnecessary fillers like “um,� and “shit,� I bit a large piece of my curry chicken salad sandwich, and chomped away until an answer appeared. Halfway through the third swallow, I remember the flight from Marrakech to Amsterdam to take a Megabus to London with a woman, Hella, who only spoke French. I speak no French, but Google Translator is better than Kofi Annan, and Tinder, where we met, is a blessing when traveling.

I remembered sitting across from Hella on our first date, not the best date but still a great date, laughing and passing the phone back and forth to translate our conversations. Every so often, we’d throw away this crutch and try speaking on our own. Her attempted american accent always came across like a Southern Belle, and mine like a drunkard attempting to sing along to Lady Marmalade. Amsterdam, for me, was to be quick, in and out; long enough to catch the tulips then get to Morocco in time to meet an old hostel roommate’s new baby. Amsterdam, for her, was a one-way ticket on a bus from Paris and a statement of freedom to her overbearing parents. For us, it was absinthe, white widow, space cake, late night KFC runs, and a shaky promise to meet here this time next year, but to keep in touch until then. These promises usually go unfulfilled by travelers.  

It’s easier to find the meaning of life than to find the door you need after leaving the Jemaa El Fna at night. After an hour, I paid a slick kid on a moped five American dollars to help me, and within minutes I was sitting in the hostel, drinking hot Moroccan mint tea with too much sugar, and eating cookies with an unfamiliar taste. Wifi connected. I open the Whatsapp notification and read, “Back you come to Amsterdam. You come to London with me?� It was Hella, and without thought, I replied, “When?� Three sips later, she responds, “Two days. I buy tickets and hostel.� “Okay.�

Hella waited for me at the station, eating pastries, drinking tea, and sitting on her backpack against a wall, charging her phone. I spotted her before she looked up, thankfully, because my smile was big, and I was embarrassed. She’d cut her hair about 3 inches shorter, and I could tell she wasn’t used to it because of how she still flung back what wasn’t there. I laughed and stopped in front of her and watched her eyes go from my shoes to my belt to my face, and her lips go from munching to smiling. In reality, this smile, above anything else, is what I came back for, a year earlier than promised. She hands me her phone with a pre-written translated message, “I missed you. I’m glad you are here.�
In line for the bus, we stood behind a Ghanaian woman being told she wouldn’t be allowed to board if she insisted on carrying whatever meat she had thawing in her bag. After 20 minutes of what I thought would escalate into a fight sooner than later, she sadly threw away the bag, and we all boarded. Hella and I sat in the very back, next to the toilets we hoped no one would destroy on this 10-hour ride. From my bag, I pulled out the gifts I’d bought my mom, and taught her how to say it in English, “Jewelry box.� “Boite á bijoux,� she said.

For an hour, we passed our phones back and forth, going deeper, laughing harder, asking questions I imagine engaged couples are asked just days before the wedding. I kissed her and she kissed me. Her hair smelled like coconut oil and a White Rain shampoo, and her lips tasted like bon bons from La Colmena bakery in Barcelona at 7am. Her last message before both our phones died said, “You smell like good air.�

The electrical outlets on this bus were useless, and we sat there, staring out of the window at the night falling hard, her head on my shoulder, my arm falling asleep with me not willing to move to a more comfortable position. Silence. I remembered reading about couples who spoke different languages and how they’d never fully be able to understand one another because sarcasm and jokes rarely translate well. She didn’t know me to be the joker all the Americans feel I am because I feared insulting her. We sat silent, pointing out stars, cows, bikers, and moles on each other’s arms and hands.

Somewhere just outside of Brussels, Hella sat up abruptly, kissed my neck, and laughed, rummaging through her bag. She pulled out an iPod she forgot she packed, and a strange, double-headed cord, and stuck it into the iPod. “Headphones,� she said, holding out her hand. I gave her mine, and she stuck them into one of the heads. She pulled her headphones from her pocket, and stuck them into the other and pushed play. James Vincent McMorrow, Labrinth, Marian Mereba, and Alabama Shakes, Ed Sheeran, and Tom Rosenthal carried us through Belgium and France. Music has always been personal for me. My playlists are guarded like the Disney Vault, but with each song, I couldn’t help but think Hella found my code. We crossed the Channel to me and Hozier softly singing “Work Song� to Hella, and her burying herself deeper into my college tshirt.

“Making love to you was never second best,� Hella sang, accent-less and perfectly on key as we pulled into Victoria Coach Station.

Jane, swallowing the last bit of her tuna melt, shook her head slowly, watching my eyes come back to hers, her ears waiting to find out what became of me and Hella. Months ago, I received a letter from Hella asking me to not contact her anymore because she’s met some guy who listens to bad music and has been nowhere. She likes him though and will probably love him because he’s close, and I’m here Googling, “Do I need to get rid of all signs of someone to get over them?� Simply, though, I tell Jane, “I don’t know, really. We happened until we didn’t anymore.� She smiles, hops on her phone, and moments later tells me to ride with her across the city to pick up a double-headed cord from some stranger on Craigslist. “Let’s see if my music is good,� she says.

The Starbucks I tell people is on 7Th Ave South but is really on Grove Street in The Village is where I was when I found out my friend was raped. I hate that it was here, because it’s the Starbucks where shitty kids steal earned belongings from half-decent people like me when we ask the neighboring table to keep an eye on them. So now, not only am I grieving for my friend, I have to keep my eyes clear enough to see these thieves.

Fuck it, I figure, let the tears come.

My friend was raped in the front seat of a car by a boy she trusted enough to give her a ride home from the movie they watched and laughed at together. I could have taken the 1 uptown, walked a couple blocks, hopped on the D, and been at her door within two hours, but I could only sit there and think about what must have been going through her head when she grew tired of fighting back and finally figured it was better to let him finish so he could kiss her goodnight and not understand where her tears came from. He didn’t understand. He thought they were born in joy.

After all, she did accept the ride home, and she did flirt back, and she did kiss him, and you know how women are always playing hard to get. She wanted it, right? These tears are joyful tears. I imagine she played the conversations with her best friends and parents and cops and doctors over and over in her head, and after she spoke, they would all ask the same question, “So what did you do to cause it?� or “You should have known better.� In each scenario in her head, she takes the fall.

I kept reading with tight fists, wishing she knew to find him now. She goes on in her story about her life after him. I’m waiting for part where she brings in the cops. I’m reading faster because I need to get to the part where she tells her father. I imagine me as the father of a daughter who’s been raped. I imagine there being no known force to remove my fingers from inside the rapists� chest. I have a son, and I would do the same for him if he’s raped, but that fear doesn’t come into my everyday thoughts. I read on, never finding satisfaction.

She kept living because she didn’t know how not to. She kept breathing, and showing up at practice, and attempting to trust and love and kiss boys who she’d never tell about what happened that night. She didn’t know what else to do but go on.

In the years that followed that story, more friends have shared their stories with me. Strangers have come and sat with me, inboxed me, and simply stopped me on the street to talk about what happened to them. Rape happened to them. A society that asks women to keep the semen in their vaginas and on their pencil skirts and in their hair until the police eventually arrive happened to them.

Sexism happened too, and it’s being fed and nurtured by the crusaders against racism. It’s tricky that way.

Last week I stopped at a little bookstore in Burlington, VT and bought my first work by Pearl Cleage, “Deals With The Devil. And Other Reasons To Riot.� I fucked up and should have left it where I found it. She writes about her days on the Hilltop at Howard, having her feet and hands tied by a boyfriend who promised to never let another man have her since he couldn’t. I didn’t flinch, because I know that story. I’m trying now to save a former friend from an pre-physically abusive relationship, but she won’t speak to me. I’m still trying. I did throw the book across the room when Cleage recalls the chorus of Black men singing out their objections to Black women authors� versions of Black relationships. How opposed those men were to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls, but how silent they were when Black male violence in real life was being condoned, taught, glamorized then ignored.

I hated how I felt standing in that bookstore on Church St. unable to imagine how painful it must be to want someone to fight you, knowing the culture is not set up for that. To see something so clear that you begin believing you’re crazy when others don’t see it too. Cleage ended a paragraph with “I wonder how much good all those poems about beautiful African queens can do in the face of a backhand slap across the mouth and a merciless rape in the bedroom of your own house.� Welcome to the house. I threw the book.

With deep side eyes, I’m looking at my friends who surprised me with their apologist behaviors. The only women who were ever raped are the women they know personally; all others are liars. So easy it was for them to believe their friends from college and that cousin from the north, but they somehow manage to find the strangers� stories too complex; too difficult.

“He didn’t rape her,� they say. “Why would she wait twenty years to say anything?� Perhaps she went on living. Perhaps she didn’t wait 20 years and told those she knew would help her get through it, not those who would make her relive it over and over and over and then do nothing to help her cleanse her spirit of that night.

“They knew what they went over there for,� they say. “Who shows up at man’s house at midnight, drunk, knowing drugs were present.� And I think about the times I found myself in a drug den in Beverly Hills after midnight with questionable characters and what could have happened. I think about my friends who are spewing this ignorance and the situations in which they’ve found themselves. Are they insane? Do they realize the number of times they could have opened their eyes to someone thrusting away on top of them?

My friend thinks Bill isn’t a rapist. He also has no idea why his fiancé, also my friend, has trust issues with men. I know because she told me. She’s scared to tell him now. She’s scared he’ll call her a liar. Or worse, he’ll console her and make her wonder if it’s genuine, especially after all he’s said about the women like her.

“He’s a cheater and a sociopath and a pervert and a obviously disturbed, but he didn’t rape those women,� they say. “They’re just trying to make a dollar while bringing greatness down.�

On the phone he told the woman to tell her mother about the orgasm the woman never knew she had.

There are the women who have never been raped, or don’t know they were raped because definitions in their household are blurred, that say, “If I was raped, I wouldn’t wait so long. I would speak out immediately and bring him down.� I point them in the direction of:

1. The women who spoke out immediately and watched nothing happen to their rapists.2. The many thousands of women in the military who report it knowing nothing will happen to their rapists because nothing has ever happened to a rapist in the military.3. My friends who’ve been raped and are speaking out about their thoughts on rape before they were raped and their thoughts on rape after they were raped.

But they still don’t listen.

I’m afraid I have friends who don’t know where the line is drawn. I’m afraid I have more friends that have been raped but haven’t spoken up because they’re not sure how to say, “I went over to have sex, and get high, and drink, but before I could consent to the sex part, I couldn’t feel my feet, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up.� I’m afraid I have friends who have entered women who said “no� repeatedly, but though it was a part of the “game she was playing.�

And I’m afraid the definition of rape changed without anyone’s consent. Too many men and women are looking for the woman crying in the shower, skin bleeding from scrubbing, still in ripped panties and a black eye. There are photos knocked over in the living room, a lock has been popped, and a door has been kicked in. To them, this is what rape really is, and nothing more.

Meanwhile, they work hard to make a liar of the woman in flawless makeup in a classroom waiting for her students to enter because teaching them about French Literature is the only thing getting her through the day.

And here I am, just writing because I don’t know what else to do. Write and teach my son and his friends and my cousins what is right and what isn’t. Writing because I’m tired of Charles Davis being the exception and not the rule when speaking out about Black male responsibility without pigeonholing or dealing in respectability politics. Maybe even a part of me believes that by sharing facts with my “rapey� friends who, like Dana Scully, will find every excuse to ignore truth because it means everything must now be questioned, even their own actions, saying “rape culture� won’t stop further discourse. “They weren’t raped. What he did wasn’t rape,� leaves women with less adequate words to describe a situation to themselves and anyone who asks. I suspect after hearing this for so long, I’d not come forward either until I was able.

And should I have a daughter before society is better, I’ll teach her to set herself on fire when men come to speak.

I remember you asked what I was waiting for.

A little piece of light.

I’m afraid, sometimes, of meditation. I do it more often now, and most times the thoughts are fine, but sometimes my thoughts go to dark places. I think about how I’ve adapted, how I evolved, and I wonder if I’ve noticed. I try to notice now. I’ve become more intentional. I don’t like it all. I loved the me I was long ago more than I love the me I am now, but I love them both a great deal. I try not to think about that boy and that man.

In Mexico, in a cave, are fish known as Astyanax Mexicanus. They weren’t always blind. They weren’t always void of pigment or insomniacs. Darkness did that. I wonder if in their mind, does the “I once was…� or “we once were…� thought exist. Not because they feel weak in their current space, of course, because they shine there, but because these thoughts, at least for me, are natural.

I try not to think about that boy and that man, but meditation forces it. Perhaps it’s not too awful because of the growth. Imagine what would happen if one day someone walked by that fish cave and let the light in.  I suppose I’m waiting for someone to let the light in.

My neighbor.s mom is dying and I can hear him arguing with his brother over the little belongings she has and will be leaving. I heard the apartment manager’s wife ask for the mother’s phone number so she could call and send her condolences, but I think she only wants to be able to say “I just talked to her the other day,� when she hears the news that she’s finally dead. 

I sat in my apartment thinking about her grandchildren that sit on my stoop and how their grandmother is probably the only somebody who loves them like 7-year-olds should be loved. They’ll be alone this Christmas because chances she’ll make it a few more weeks are slim. THey will be ignored by the living, and there is no insurance money their daddy can use to buy gifts. 

Books keep company. I grabbed 127 of my favorite ones, and built a tree. I put lights on them. I’ll give a couple to the kids the next time I see them on my stoop so they won’t be so lonely Christmas morning if I’m not here. 

He did a few lines of coke and a shot of tequila and looked at his ex’s current relationship and her old one and realized everything that happened. She never wanted niceties, kindness, security, or protection.

She wanted proof of love through insanity. He couldn’t provide that.

One more line.