As uncertain as the first drop of rain, an undecided sky trying to pick what game to play, she was the wild kind of beautiful. With her, every heartbeat was a fist against heavens door and my chest was left a battered jukebox playing broken tunes for broken men. See wild things always leave broken in their wake.

So we unlearn love by attaching orange peels to naked mandarins, and maybe one day I will love mandarins for who they are but I still see your face in every crowd because most times close enough is good enough, so apologies to mandarins. When I said forever, please do not believe I lied, for forever is just another way of saying from birth to death, so let us bury this alongside old jumpers and handmade cards. Let us gather all the orange peels from the kitchen floor and find all the places we hid ourselves in each other.

Now my mother worries about me, she doesn’t mention it but she says “remember your roots”, I almost said it’s hard when you’re trying to branch out, but I just said always, I always say always. I always mean sometimes the ocean between us makes me feel like half a story no one will ever truly understand. So apologies to mandarins, until your skin learns to unravel across an ocean to the doorsteps of old black women with crowns for hair that doesn’t know how to fall and wishing well bellies where dreams come from, I will always be half a story and you will always be half my life.