she reminds me of you.
although zadie initially rebuked her connection to zora, zadie eventually uttered “she is my sister and i love her.”1
unlike zadie, you were always my sister and i loved you beyond the dense countenances that attempted to push against time. the black earl grey would often dance between our words that conjured harmonious futures through birthed brown children. you were my sister. there were no spaces between us that compartmentalized a voice or emotion into silence, because we pushed the world into the periphery, breathed, and took off semblances of knowing, when we did not know.
our collective passions were relentless, as we led each other into eternal obscurities. every shared moment had a palette of an organic vanilla. you felt my numerous pains when words could not form and tears hit concrete, because the world never sufficed, for i always sided with audre when she said, “after all isn’t that what we each long for; a sister who we respect without suspicion who says yes, i see you my sister.”
now, time had elapsed. your foreign face lacked our girlwoomanhood years that once embraced us into a fortified union. i masked the pain with a stoic gaze toward the lukewarm water, that once steamed, bubbled, poured, into teacups. there were no words and i refused to accept the distance between our eyes. you looked different, and i felt different, all the same.
but, i wanted to believe, say, and write to you, through maturation, across diverged lives, that “you are still my sister and i love you.”
1 Excerpt from Zadie Smith’s “On Their Eyes Were Watching God: What Does Soulful Mean?,” in her newly published book “Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays.”
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