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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…