what comes after: of space enough
a love letter to women of color in eight parts
1.
in 1993,
Toni Morrison once said,
Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What is it to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.
to be a woman is to not be a man
to be a woman of color is to move in the margins
to be us is to have no home in this place
to be us is to be set adrift from what we know
to be us is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear our company
which is to ask:
who are we without our oppression? what are we without our trauma?
2.
writing a love letter to women of color is both a writing of liberation and of grief. love demands both, necessitates simultaneous histories.
our lives are not relative, but relational. in relation. in tender opposition. that to crave liberation, we first swallowed oppression; to make love, we first touched grief; to know me, i first knew you.
this writing tries to deny the white gaze and the male gaze. in truth, i am not sure that space exists. yet, we write.
3.
so,
let us dream of taking flight, of loving ourselves whole with lives stapled shallow
our arms barely wide enough to reach each other
yes, let us dream.
of weightlessness. of gentle feet tapping beats. of indigo skies made by us, for us, through us. of mothers who know nothing of loss and despair in the shape of their homelands. of memories that seed gardens. of bloom, blooming. of belly laughs, not heart aches. of sisters who find themselves by moonlight and find each other by sunlight. of singing as crying, as prayers, as embraces. of sadness only to feel our bodies unfold into tenderness, that first quake of laughter stretching open across our chests. of falling in love, falling into each other, free falling just cause. of laying down our armor. of our uncontainable nakedness.
of our weightlessness.
of space enough for all who love us — us, women of color
of color
of ever color.
4.
at this moment, there is no one i love more, miss more than my grandpa. he is who i think of, dream of, reach for. every slipping moment reminds me of him, a braid of knots slumbering inside my throat, seeking sunlight each time my mouth opens, even when i do not call his name.
he was a traditional lao-chinese man full of contradictions, seeing the granddaughter he felt most tender for holding up an entire universe and still kneeling before husbands, fathers, and grandfathers. an inescapable destiny.
in the same way that i became his destiny.
in writing this love letter to women of color, it became written through the destiny that is my grandpa’s gaze. a destiny of contradictions, a love undeserving yet so demanding — not in its selfishness but its inevitability.
it is impossible not to love him to his roots, which i’ve only touched the surface of. his dying sank me to my depths, a drowning i’ve surrendered to endlessly. it is through the eyes of others — his eyes — that i see myself. that i become.
which is to ask in relation:
who are we without our tenderness? what are we without the people who love us as destiny?
a love letter to us is that we —
we are inevitable.
5.
Dear Connie,
I’ve been looking at you these past 32 years — I’m always looking at you. How you’ve grown to no longer fit on my back or in my arms the way you used to when we sat in front of that dusty TV. It’s hard to look away from you and everyone that surrounds me as I get older and older. In aging and sickness, all I can do is keep looking around me and let my eyes do the talking. I think you’ve always understood this about me. The things kept safe in my gaze.
I know you think my eyes are sad. And they are. You’ll understand one day.
But what I want to tell you today is that they are also sad because I don’t know how to tell you how wonderful you are. From the day you arrived, you, a wilderness that knew no boundaries, just that you were ours. I don’t have the words, the language, the grasp to tell you how proud I am to have helped raise you. All I can do, especially these days, is to gaze upon you. Keep you safe that way.
You’re not my favorite grandchild (I have no favorites) but I held you with the most tenderness because your life has not been yours alone. Yours wasn’t easy, I know. I watched things happen to you with passive eyes, though never unloving, unwanting eyes. And there were times when I could’ve done more, done differently, but didn’t.
That’s why I look at you the way I do. To be sorry and to keep safeguarding you.
And yet, look at you. After all that. Look at you.
I still don’t have the words or the language or the grasp to tell you how I feel about you. It’s more than pride and joy, more than obligation and bloodline, more than love.
What comes after love? After braving the collapse of lives measured by the hours of the day, days of the year, and years of a lifetime. What comes after?
That’s what I feel for you.
You gave me purpose. You gave me the kind of light that follows only in the shadows of heartache so deep that drowning felt like the only way up. You taught me the tenderness of love because there was so much of it that I didn’t know what to do with the spilling. You gave me time, so much time that I became greedy and wanted more. I didn’t want to leave you. Any of you. You gave me the will to stay, the courage to look. You gave me a better version of myself that only you could give. You gave me you.
I’m sorry to you for many things. For leaving you — before, then, and now. For you signing a “do not resuscitate” under my name; I’ll never forget how your hands shook. For you carrying that, and more. I am sorry.
But granddaughter, thank you for doing these things for me. We live a life of contradictions and perhaps, that’s the most profound kind of love we can muster. To love unselfishly though not unconditionally, to love in the margins, to love in this place without a home, to love adrift from what we know and want, to love at the edge of towns that cannot bear our company, our grief. I don’t know who Toni Morrison was but she is wise and keeps great company. She says hello.
What comes after love is you. It’s always been you.
I’m still gazing. Forever upon you.
And you are a wonder to behold.
Never forget that.
Love,
Grandpa
6.
these are the words i imagine him saying, a love letter of forgiveness — both a gift and a seeking buried inside his version of a patriarchy, a version i archived as loving gently and fiercely through this unforgiving life of contradictions.
and i wonder how my inability to deny the male gaze is an echo of my grandpa’s gaze, an inescapable destiny for women of color that is both a gift and a seeking of forgiveness. this resonance between the two is cosmic, yet so singular that i can’t help but laugh
and cry
that what comes after love, after the grief and trauma of living in our skins as women of color, is still us —
me
knowing you, knowing me.
7.
i still don’t have the words, the language, or the grasp but i need to write this again: what comes after love is us.
that despite being sculpted in the slick of our trauma
a second skin burrowing into the one we first called home
that despite this —
we are a revival
shedding the shape and slick and arriving home to a space inside ourselves that asks nothing of heart aches and everything of belly laughs, taking the uncontainable pain of
you
knowing me
knowing us
us, women of color
rearranged into a soundtrack you find yourself dancing inside.
of weightlessness. of gentle feet tapping beats. of indigo skies made by us for you. of you discovering because of us. of bloom, blooming. Of singing as crying, as prayers, as embraces — your soundtrack.
and you are dancing.
laying down your armor only to see a reflection so disarming you fall into a sigh of sweet amnesia that this life, this world, ever knew anything of terror in the shape of homelands, of loving in darkness as survival, an engulfing of futures.
instead, we are a revival of your weightlessness.
of space enough for all who love you
because of us, women of color
of color
of ever color
you are dancing, loving, becoming
an unforgettable daylight.
you survive and thrive because of us.
which is to ask over and over:
who are you without our tenderness? what are you without the people who love you whole?
who see you.
8.
we — women of color — give the world and its people a better version of themselves and that’s something only we can give.
we are destiny
we are inevitable
we are what comes after love
