The story I like to believe in is the one where we get to love one another—the one where we get to kiss. Because even now, I still want to kiss you. I want to touch you the way sunlight touches the tiles beneath my feet. I want to warm your toes. I want to spread over you like light, flush you with a deeper shade, a color, a memory to carry within your skin for days.
Do you remember the summer we met? How rude I was? I’m sorry I was so rude. I thought everyone in Grand Corail was beneath me somehow. Me and my fifteen-year-old self. I wanted everyone to know how different I was, because I came from New York City where I had a whole room to myself, with electricity, and a toilet that flushed. I wouldn’t even eat the chicken your grandmother cooked that first night, because it smelled too fresh. Too recently alive.
I acted that way, but really, I was afraid. I was afraid that a snake would bite me in the ass while I was squatting over the outhouse seat. I was afraid of the dark, and afraid of the way that everyone stared at me. You know how Haitians stare. They don’t blink and they don’t flinch. Everyone was staring or laughing at the way I talked, even the way I walked. I still have a scar from that time I tripped and scraped my big toe on a sharpened rock. Do you remember lifting my ankle into your lap and wiping the blood away? You said my foot was soft, and when you laughed, I laughed too. I felt so alone until you came to my rescue. You know that? You saved me.
I liked that you let me join in your chores, and that when I was with you, I didn’t have to talk much, because we both preferred listening. Do you remember how we sat with our feet propped on river rocks, and you taught me how to wash clothes? My mother had always tried to frighten me with this kind of manual chore, but she didn’t know how much I would enjoy it, using my strength to make the fabric clean, scrubbing my shorts until the suds sang and the skin on my knuckles felt raw. When we finished with the washing, we’d strip to our underclothes, and wade into the river until it reached our navels. We’d dip under, tire ourselves against the current, then release our bodies to the downstream effervescence. After, we’d wring ourselves out on the boulders, next to our drying laundry.
I loved watching water droplets glide down your thighs and evaporate without a trace. What were you thinking, when your face turned skyward, eyes closed, smile flickering at the corners of your mouth?
I think about that summer often, especially now that my grandmother is gone. Nobody else in my family knows Grand Corail the same way I do, not even my mother, who was born here and claims to have “sent me back home.” I told her that she couldn’t “send me back” because you can’t go back to somewhere you’ve never been. And in any case, the place I was sent back to had changed with time and become a different place than what she’d known. But eventually Grand Corail became my center of origin. It’s here that I first learned what it meant to be divine. Where I first felt love, the way love is supposed to feel.
Remember those loud, lanky boys who tried to lure us into the banana field next to the soccer pitch? Remember—this was hard to forget because it was the first time I’d heard anybody call us by our name—the name for what we are. We should have been more careful, but we were young. We didn’t know how closely they would watch us. They saw the way you leaned into me in the grass, your head on my shoulder, your palm on my lap. They watched our arms web together, our gazes lace and tangle.
Still, I was afraid to touch you the way I really wanted to. Could you tell? I had already seen some things that made me feel strange, in torn magazines in my uncle’s dustbin, and on the Canadian teen TV channel I’d sneak to watch on muted volume when my mother wasn’t home. One of the boys had a flip phone that they would all huddle around, staring into its tiny, pixelated screen that glowed in the dimming summer night. When those boys said our name that first time, they thrusted the phone into our faces. On the screen were two blonde girls, naked, touching, and kissing.
You knocked away the phone and told them to shut their filthy mouths. They yanked at our wrists and grabbed our breasts. We scratched, and screamed, and ran. I could hardly keep up with you—you who knew the paths better than me, and how to run on unpaved road that shifted underfoot. We ran to our grandmothers’ houses, which sat next to one another, divided by a short wall and a hedge of cherry brushes. And by the time we reached them, we were laughing, doubled over at the absurdity of it all. We were laughing, but I still never forgot their hands, like fat frogs jumping all over my skin.
Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like for us to have another story. The one where I stayed in Grand Corail with you forever, and we went to school together and lived out all our days as neighbors. Would you have been satisfied with that? Us growing old together, in our ancient homes, on the same mountain our families have been living on for two hundred years? I know it wouldn’t have been possible, but I like to imagine it: a world where my branch of the family tree remained rooted somewhere, in a place I belonged. It’s been ten years since I met you. I’ve never belonged anywhere else.
Remember when we flew those kites at the lookout behind the primary school? And do they still believe that kite making isn’t for people like us? I remember the uncles and fathers and grandfathers who came to the soccer pitch to teach their sons how to fashion bodies that could fly. They tried to stop me, but I watched from a distance and learned how to measure the wooden sticks, how to strip and bind them, how to string them together and line the kite bones with glue and tissue paper skin.
I dedicated my kite to you. I chose pink for the panels, then cut a letter Z from a sheet of white paper and fixed it to the back. I even made sixteen tails, one for every year you’d lived. The next day the wind was sweet, the sun gentle on our shoulders. As we watched our handmade toy shrink and soar like a tethered bird, I wondered how we must have looked from up there, at the other end of our paper dreams—what a dragonfly would have seen, or a hawk, first watching bright patches of color litter the airspace, then our bodies down below, tugging our strings and working the wind. My grandmother hung my kite on a nail in her bedroom and kept it there all summer long. Do you know what happened to it, after I left?
When I got back to New York that fall, my mother was waiting for me at the airport with a KitKat bar and a purple balloon that said, “Welcome Home!” I sat in the passenger seat of our sedan, eating my favorite chocolate candy that was suddenly too sweet. America felt too big, too full of fake light. The air was thick and dirty in my throat, and everything was moving too fast. I missed the slow rise of the sun in the sky. I missed the song of cows and roosters in the morning.
Have you ever seen the pearly cracked petals of an empty cocoon? That was the state of my heart after leaving you. Whenever planes passed overhead, I refused to look up.
The house feels different without her. Do you feel it? My grandmother’s spirit has flown from this place, even though her body is just a hundred yards away, in that white tomb out front. I miss her big pots of rice and peas and her hot chocolate with coconut milk, garnished with lime zest. I don’t know anybody who does it like that, but it was my favorite. It still is. I miss the way she swept the yard, with that straw broom in one hand, the other arm hooked behind her back. I’m grateful that you were here when she died. The first nurse this community has ever had, and everybody is so proud, they talk about you like you’re a doctor. Did you hold her hand? What was it like to see her cross over into that other world?
I feel bad that we weren’t here—my mother and I. We came as quickly as we could, and thankfully we made it for the wake. You always think you have more time to love the people you love. My mother tried regularly to convince my grandmother to move, but she never liked the States. She kept her visits short and came only in warm months. I thought I’d have more time to be with her, here in her home. But each year has passed and blurred like a hummingbird in flight.
At the wake, I didn’t even recognize you at first. Your jaw had set, your eyes had become even more beautiful, and your hair was braided and pinned around your head, instead of the short kinky twists you used to wear. But your laugh was still the same, tinkling like gold coins in a cup. Your lips were the same too, and so was my desire to reach for them.
Remember our first kiss? Remember we slept in one bed together, and my grandmother slept in the cot in the front room? And her snores whistled in the air and the night was so dark around us? Remember the way we pretended to sleep? Our hands lifted the edges of our shirts and rested on hot skin. Our lips touched just close enough to our ears for the secret to remain ours. I remember your tongue in my ear. The pulse at your throat and the terrible fear that crept over my body when we heard the groan of my grandmother shifting weight in her sleep.
I remember the caress of your fingers on my shoulders, the rising pitch of my breath which I tried to control. It felt like we were a pair of sparks too hot for our own skin. And then I remember, like a fever breaking, the cool word. I turned it over in my mouth and wondered how a name so beautiful could be spat so ugly and make us feel wrong.
Madivin. Ma Divineuse. My Divine. Mine. My love, my wonder, my rapture, my celestial being. My holy. My sacred. My that-which-is-precious. My sublime. My salvation. My divine.
The next morning, the fog settled around the house and the garden, making the whole world look like a daydream. I remember a yellow butterfly beating its wings above the cotton trees, fluttering in the lime flowers, which were open and sensuous and buzzing with morning bees. I remember the look in your eyes when you pinched my waist in a way that felt like you’d pinned me down and lifted my skirt. We pinched each other all day long.
Tomorrow I will fly to New York, and the next day I will go to work, at a desk in a building so tall, it looks to be piercing the sky. Do you know that in New York we could be married? We could be in love. No one could stop us from doing it. Of course, some bitter folks are trying, but I have been to weddings for people like us. I’ve witnessed women in white, made holy in their love. They have stepped on glass and broken plates and jumped over brooms. They have kissed and danced and displayed evidence of having been loved in framed photos at their office desks.
The women are not without their fears, that the marriages might one day be stripped from them. That their neighbors, whose inner minds are unknowable, may externalize their violence under the right conditions. But for now, it is “the law of the land,” as my mother says. She knows about me. We’ve dealt with it, and she’s accepted me, because we are all each other has. But I always thought “law of the land” was the wrong phrase to use. The ground has never asked anyone to prove themselves worthy of love. The laws of land are simple. Give and receive. It is human law that makes more rules. It is the law of man that cordons the land and binds it with stipulations.
Do you like the man you married? Wasn’t he the boy who tried to grab me that summer, all those years ago? Your baby is fat, with rings of chub on his arms and legs. I think he has your eyes, and your nose. He will take your color too; it’s already beginning at his ears. I looked out for him at the funeral, but you said babies don’t belong at ceremonies for the dead. But then you came by this morning, bobbing him on your hip, a splotch of warm milk dampening the front of your shirt. We sat on the porch, and I held your baby’s soft foot in my hand and wiggled his budding toes. You looked happy; motherhood looks good on you. You are alive, and you got your nursing degree, and you seem alright with that man and the new life you’ve been building. You’ve made a story for yourself. One you can hold onto and see the end of.
But do you remember how divine we were? How young and hopeless and simple? The things I want you to remember are hatching beyond my tongue. Our kite in the clouds. The blades on a dragonfly’s back. Your cheek. A bat’s velvet wing.
