To be a Phoenix

I’ve got wanderlust in my bones, these feet were made to carry me on long and unusual roads, across blood red seas, tracing the Equator, occupying spaces between borders that lead back to the centre of me. A woman like me, learned the painfully slow — hard way about love and how it liberates by not holding on too tight — stifling breaths. I want to unpack the world, unlocking any barriers between the sky and me — and throwing away the keys, be Black as onyx in every city unapologetically, roll on rivers and break the dawn and the sea, get lost and found like treasure, be infused with the scent of sunshine mixed with a hint of hurricane, sit on the dock of a bay rocking to the rhythm of the tide, just get busy, wasting this stupid construct called time.

You were some kind of cliché, the tall, dark stranger — with midnight eyes that everyone warns everyone about. I was some kind of Cinderella who never went to the ball, not quite as hungry as Oliver Twist, but I guess I had an appetite for some forbidden things. I was twenty and you — seventeen, the sweetest taboo.

Buju Bantons Til Shiloh was the soundtrack we rocked to, as we fell in deep and you confessed your love to me — whilst whispering that I would be the one to claim your virginity as your eighteenth approached — just a heartbeat away. Imagine that? Well, I’ll admit — my ego felt some kind of pride about that reality. You bought me a watch, a lovely, gold plated thing. I never wore watches, but I adored that one. I didn’t realise it was another symbol of the everything you wanted to change about me, from my conversations to my clothes to my hair, you offered to buy me lipstick if I would wear that too, but I refused with a ‘no thank you’. It wouldn’t be long, before both our egos crashed and burned.

For the million ways we hurt each of the ones we say we love, for all the dreams we shatter bit by bit, if time has any use at all, it can forgive us for what we have done when we’re young.

Burning bridges, is a cathartic act of self preservation that I don’t take lightly these days, the process can be such a hurting thing. Sometimes, when you notice you’re carrying these suitcases full of stuff, you just need to unpack and strike up a match. After the chaos of every fire, I can reclaim free, I am a renaissance woman — paving different roads with every little step. These roads are still long, my heart is still open to new love and other ways of being. So, I’m trying to pack nothing but light. Of course, I’ll smile if you stand by all of me, but I’ll thank you if your love can liberate me to myself — and smile as you watch me fly.