BROWN SKIN | BOOK 1

|| C H A P T E R . 31 ||

Where I am from, sometimes. . .

there's no sun.

Because where we grew up and from what we know, band-aids don't heal bullet holes and cold peas can't treat the black eyes and bad news about a loved one doesn't help an explosion.

—Ebonee

News didn't travel fast enough that across the ocean in Belgium, there was a bomb explosion in a small cafe with three foreigners and a plethora of natives and all I can remember were the three happened to be Americans. The story never televised, and if it did, there was never a time I watched television like everyone else as I should. Mom was one of them. She never came back. Beau never returned either.

I started watching television, like fabricated news more.

But that happened a couple weeks ago.

I remembered they were still trying to identify human bones to be positive and why she never returned home or called, making sure she was the one. That's why it took so long to determine identity. I remembered Jewelz was crying too much to tell me what happened, sobbing into her guilt like it was her fault, but I was the one that should take the blame. I didn't know how to feel at all at first because it didn't hit me I suppose. I was supposed to be shedding tears and weeping along with her, yet couldn't. That was. . .my mom. The one who gave birth to me and who I was angry towards but grateful to have.

I remembered Jewelz was crying too much as the pretty pillars in her eyes melted to tell me the incident. She cried pretty too, similar to the acting girls in music videos and in movies. Yet, the information hit, none of it seemed real. She's not dead. Your mother is fucking dead. She wasn't gone too long ago, I just hated her for not replying to me. She'll be back. Your mother fucking exploded into chunks and tiny pieces and just like how Beau told his father, "You didn't care." That was— my mom, like—wow.
I wanted to say all the times we had were bad. Or good, like at age four, I took karate lessons and dance classes because she encountered sexual assault at twenty and saw a talent I would break into at the sound of music in a living room. Or she told me not to relax my hair, don't get hooked on "creamy crack" because it's addicting and my hair won't touch my waist anymore and if you don't speak up and say something, guys will think you're a fool and take advantage of you.

But she also told me to hush up "when I didn't know any better" and told me guys fall for the long curls and long hair, not short naps like why would you damage your hair like that anyway, your hair broke off because you did this to yourself and you have to learn how to fight because as a woman, who's going to really defend you?

The same one who gave birth to me made a relationship so troubling in my childhood that I don't know the difference with someone showing me love now and the difference between being grateful and tough love.

I never told anyone that.

I remembered the hot water ran down the length of my arm and in between my toes. I stayed that way until the water swallowed into the shower drainage. Minutes turned to hours in the shower, shriveling my fingers into dried grapes. It was okay to be alone and think. Just pure silence and I didn't understand how people couldn't stand silence. The more mute, the more blissful it is, but you hear everything then.

You could hear envelopes tear open into two, small talk between André and Jewelz as if they just met for the first time. Then I heard the sound of the moonlight illuminate opaque-like over the color of Beau's eyes with a deep aphrodisiacal stare like I could be more than enough for this world and him and the sound of his cracked amourous smile hidden partially in the pillows. Silhouettes. And the sound of the brown waves lapping on the rough rocks as we sit after the storm, drying in a sunless sky. Our vacation. And when we sit together unspoken, it's beautiful.