TheStoryOfMyBecoming

We met at the nascent of womanhood,

Our girl shells fracturing to make room for our forming

Toffee-nosed early 20 somethings walking tall like we had clocked this life thing

Our ostentatious lives serving as tell-tales of our jutting.

The reality of adulthood soon washed over,

Our days drowning in scorn at the feeling of the mundane thieving at time.

We cried for better days, Sleeping At Last arming us with guitar strings and war metaphors.

Sushi soothings dwarfing our mingy salaries,

And yet still, strutting hallways with no damn to give!

Oh, how we’ve grown.

Though calloused and creased by time, the remnants of our dreamy girl selves linger still.

We’ve held hands through the dreamy and dreggy mid 20s,

Built visions of cities in mudpies and the sky.

To watch your toy stories rise to life has been such a wonder

And now may it be as it has been and more.

Selah

Through every peak and trough,

Me and you be soldiering sisters.

Be sharp shooters and cheeky choices.

Be shouting efforts through shaky voices.

We be resolve and resilience.

Raged black women bathed in kindness.

Though time has done what it does best to the most fiery crackers,

We rage still.

And now may you be as you have been and more.

Be the dream and the hope of the slave.

30 something and still doing the damn thing.

Be our wildest dream.

A dare that dares to keep on daring.

Here.

Breathing.

Present.

Trying.

Alive.

Happiest of birthdays, friend of my heart.

I love you more now, with your coloured and complicated, than at the genesis.

And..

When I say I love you, I mean to put words to sight.

To make concession to behold stained glass.

It is to failte imperfection.

To say, this love has enough room for complicated and deficient and exasperating and proceeding.

To love is to hanker to behold the culmination of this, our sanctification.

And in the already and not yet, to choose all that you are, making a lifetime of room to welcome it.

Continually beholding the beauty that is, and has been and is to come.

“I love you” is a pact with my future self.

A valorous effort at piercing the veil between then and now.

Crossing the gully to and fro, to return with a promissory note of my future presence.