Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold(7)

‘Stand tall, my queen. I would give you the universe but how

Can I gift you to you? So I will give you my heart, strong and true,

I cannot conjure thunder, but

I will plant a forest for you, sow flowers that bloom

In your presence, fruit that tastes like your essence.’

It was supposed to be bawdy, these songs usually were. However, the way he sang caused electrical currents to course through ??un’s body in a different way to when she was with ?àngó. These currents depended on her; it was as if his energy caught fire through contact with her. She had to agree to it for it to blaze.

Erinl? was now in front of her.

‘??un, oh, ??un,

My beat is calling your waist,

Won’t you answer?

Won’t you answer?

You look like a woman who loves to dance.’

??un got up, legs unfolding easily beneath her as the clouds above rolled. She paid no attention to ?àngó. She followed Erinl? to the middle of the courtyard and allowed her hips to switch with the beat, her arms to sway through the air, laughing as she did so, as Erinl? bent low with his drum and dipped and rose as she moved, responding when she called with her waist. There was thunder, but Erinl?’s drum rose above it, interlaced with ??un’s laugh. There was lightning, but ??un’s smile outshone it. ??un was used to being looked at, but, from this moment, she would become used to being seen.





Scheherazade




I suppose, if I tell our story, I should start at the beginning. That’s the convention, right?

Once upon a time. Except you and I don’t feel bound by the temporal. Not in a pretentious mystical way, because I’m not into all of that, but very basically: we were not a ‘once’ and we were never pinned to a ‘time’.

I felt this even when I told myself we were just a transient fling. I don’t think I ever fathomed a time when I wouldn’t know him – not fully, not comprehensively. At first, I’d assumed I would move on, because that’s what I usually did, and I was good at it. I like to do things I am good at, as a general rule. I thought that we would end as a matter of course. All things end, and so I always sought to deal with romance by making the experience shorter, by controlling the length. By limiting the length, you can make the experience sweeter, like a six-episode season of your favourite TV show. It’s less able to disappoint you, less able to mess up character development and leave threads hanging. My character development was finite, and I liked to keep my threads taut. I thought there was beauty in the ephemeral and that I was being an aesthetician by hastening the death of a relationship. But, if I’m honest – and I figure that I have nothing to lose by being honest here – I never really sat down and considered what it would mean for my life to not have him in it. I must have been scared to. I’m not usually scared of anything. I should have known then what this love was.

So, what was our beginning? When we first met? When we first fell in love? But falling in love is continuous and perpetual, an activity that continues under the aegis of capital letter Love. Perhaps it was when we first made love, as he called it . . . I called it our First Fuck, which he hated. He said it corrupted it, I said it was whimsical. It was gorgeous, euphoric, primal and preternatural all at once. Our First Fuck definitely had the power to ignite a beginning. It was the kind of lovemaking that has you feeling more beautiful the next day; walking smugly with a sway, hips swishing, with a nimbus of power and joy around you, as if you were a goddess among mortals because, the other night, you inhabited heaven. You were the only thing a person could see, could taste, could hear, could feel.

I texted my best friends the morning after:

Me: ‘God. What have I done?’

Them: ‘That bad?!!’

Me: ‘That good. Too good. I have made a terrible mistake.’

The first time we met did not feel like an introduction nor did it feel like a reunion; we were just two spirits meant to be in communion. I could maybe start with the initial flirtation, the flicker of fire that occurred with our first knee brush, but even that was us formally learning the grammar to a language that our bodies and souls already knew. The closest thing I can think of to a beginning for us, or perhaps the first time we both saw and acknowledged we were an us, was our first fight.



‘Say something,’ I said.

I watched him sitting across from me at my kitchen island. He took a sip of his wine. We’d picked the bottle up together; he’d read out the description, ‘dark and sweet flavours, full bodied’, and shot me a wicked look with a raised brow before he put it in the basket. ‘My taste.’ He smiled.

It was so corny, and he knew it and I knew it, and I mimicked retching sounds, and he grabbed me up in the wine aisle, in front of the auditorium of sauvignons and pinots, and he kissed me; because it was in public, it was quick, but quick did not mean passionless. He kissed me and I felt like I’d drunk a whole row of the supermarket’s finest wines. My knees were weak. He kissed me and my second favourite pair of jeans automatically fit me better, curved around me better when his hand filled the back pocket. He kissed me, slipped a little tongue into my mouth, just a little promise, enough flavour to make me ravenous, before he whispered into my ear again, ‘my taste.’

He took a sip of that wine while sat at my kitchen island that evening. The look on his face was expertly impassive. The aroma of layered herbs and stewed meat rose into the air, mingled with the scent of my rose-and-peony candle and his cologne. Low murmuring R&B filled the dim of the room, humming at us sultrily, mockingly, almost hauntingly, ‘nobody else but you . . .’