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Contemporary People of Color Sad

She is a kaleidoscope of colours. As the evening sky is covered in all hues of orange and yellow, she stands in front of it, shimmering in the brightest shade. Her red hair is tied back in a braid but a few strands have escaped loose and are dancing around in the wind. All my feelings are woven in a web encircling her like her intricately woven braid. 

Her skin slopes graciously with honey-like gentleness over her sharp bones. It’s glowing under the sunbeams akin to the seeds at the centre of a sunflower— like she is the centre of my universe. My hands slip on her glossy skin, so I grip her tighter. The dark bruise blooming on her body is merged into her dark skin. The bruises have become her armour and she has become mine. 

Her hips are undulating. Her curves are so posh like the flute that carries the most expensive champagne. But I am a poor man, and I can’t hold this smooth glass. Her hips are just perfect and I hate them. They don’t fit in my hand and I don’t like her undulating hips. 

She is wearing a white dress. It clings to her lush breasts— I can see a faint outline of her skin through the slim material of the dress and it irks me— and flows down from her hips, looking like a cloud crashing down from the high. She is an undead dead persona in that colourless dress of hers. Splashed across her skin, hiding her true form, her white dress shields her from the world and the world from her.

She watches the sunset displayed on the horizon and I watch her. 

*

She is a myriad of emotions. Her features are etched in sadness one moment, but the next minute, a smile lights up across her face, denting her curved dimples. There is no underlying sadness or pain behind her smile. She experiences every emotion and expresses them in a thousand ways, from the way the skin around her eyes crinkles to the subtle stoop in her posture and hands hanging limply at her sides. 

She feels so much that she sucks the emotions out of me. 

We never fight. She gets upset and angry at me, and I stand there quietly listening to her rant about something that was her fault. I let her pretend that she’s right. I like to keep my feelings to myself; she likes to scream her emotions.

We are two very different people— she’s the chaos in my life, I am the peace in her soul. But we merge so beautifully, like the bright stars in the void galaxies, lighting up our gloomy reality. 

I met her two years ago in the midnight club. We got drunk on cheap beer together and woke up the next morning tangled sweatily in the silky hotel sheets, our bodies covered with the first marks of our feelings. She kissed my lips and I kissed her neck, and she kissed my salty dreams and I kissed her sweet freedom. She smiled up at me with glorious ecstasy and I became crazy for her. 

*

She is a puzzle that I can’t solve. She’s become a mystery to me like all those mystery-thriller novels that she obsesses over. I never understood her love for them. I never understood her. 

She’s the sudoku in the newspaper; I am the black and white print of the newspaper. 

We are wrong for each other in a million languages, so why does she feel right in my arms, her body pressed against mine elegantly? Why does my head fit exquisitely in the crook of her neck? Why does my palm make gorgeous designs on her cheeks?

Oh, she loves our doomed love, she does. She has the chance to leave when she wishes to, to break this illicit affair, but she never does because the truth is craves my demented self just as much as I crave her smooth body. I wake up and see her drinking coffee, my shirt hanging on her golden shoulders. And what a stunning sight it is for my sore heart. 

Our love is one for the black heavens. It’s the broken pieces of a mirror and when light reflects off it, you will be blinded in love. It made us blind in love. And I hope we will forever stay blind, unaware of our surroundings, too deep drenched in this connection that we share. 

We have had many broken pieces, broken places, broken times, in our relationship but we have thrived through it in a giggling fit and hysterical laughing. We get drunk on our smiles and chuckle at our tears, and we survive through it in a blazing, humorous glory. 

*

She is a rainbow of personalities. So many different people merged together, I wonder who I am with. I wonder if I am with just one person or all of the different shades that she has adapted and merged into.

She’s your teenage heartbreak on the lonely nights; she’s the end of your youth in the early hours of daylight. There’s summer in her tears and rain in her smile. Violent thunder is bubbling inside her, waiting to explode like a damn volcano. And I will be the one to drown in it. 

She is my naked love letter, my favourite song lyrics, the beat I wanna dance to, the story I wanna annotate.

We are lost in this library of love, climbing the ladders for the oldest, buried secrets, and immersing ourselves in the dusty covers of our lust and desire. We are drinking coffee and reciting lost poems, and we are happy.

We have always been in the negative, a toxic love, and every single issue attached to it. But this toxicity tastes better than the blood in my mouth and smells better than the sensual perfume that covers her body in a faint sheen. The knife marks look so sultry and so beautiful on our skin.

She is mine— mine till the sunsets no longer seep into the sky. 

June 25, 2021 17:14

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