2007 – 2008
Fall
A young Black woman breathes, but she is not alive. Blood flows through her veins, oxygen fills her lungs, and her muscles command a machine that has already given up, but has not yet shut down. This young Black woman is learning what it’s like to be present but still not exist.
Winter
This young woman unfolds her body every morning and scours it in a shower below ground. She is a mole person, keeping time with brown recluse spiders and ants marching along her dirt-encrusted window frames. She dresses in thick layers, then shuffles into a winterscape made colder by a white town content on keeping her at arm’s length.
While waiting for the bus, the woman thinks about the previous autumn, when it was warmer and when she stood on a mountain ridge wondering if she should let her foot tip over the edge. She wanted to see what would happen, even though she knew what would happen. She stared at the boulders and sharp drop offs and wondered what it would be like to see the open sky as it rolled over and under and tilted in ways it wouldn’t if she just kept her footing.
Spring
After attending a house party where she lingered along the edges of the room, unspoken to, the woman bikes home. The brisk night swallows her as she cruises through manicured voids dotted by street lamps. Pabst Blue Ribbon surges through her body. It unlocks a cage that restrains the wild part of herself. She pedals faster. Bright headlights shoot from left to right ahead of her like a meteor shower ready to obliterate the softness of her body. The woman closes her eyes, pumps her legs, and releases the handlebar.
Summer
The woman flees to Ecuador to feel alive. But the country is just another place to die.
She drinks to forget and drinks to feel different in her skin. She drinks to be someone else and drinks because she feels things she isn’t supposed to feel – because she is Black and Christian and because her parents raised her better.
Later one night on Santa Cruz Island, after drinking enough to turn into something else, the woman stands on a sea wall and stares into the gray-black ribboning beneath her. The hunger of the crashing waves connects with the deep longing inside her gut – no, her heart. It seduces her. The woman’s foot hovers over the nothingness between her sole//soul and the Pacific Ocean. A warm hand pulls her back and her soul//sole trembles over the sea spray dampening the ground.
Before bed, the woman rips off her shirt, shorts, and underwear. The humid air sticks to her skin. She cannot remember the last time she stripped naked and did not cower. Even in the dark, she feels the eyes of the world on her and she does not shrink. In another time, in another season, she will remember this moment and find relief.
DW McKinney is a Black American writer living in Nevada. She serves as an associate editor for Shenandoah Literary and writes a graphic novels review column for CNMN Magazine. Her writing has appeared in publications like Los Angeles Review of Books, Hippocampus Magazine, Narratively, PANK, and the anthology I’m Speaking Now (Chicken Soup for the Soul, 2021). She is the recipient of a 2021 “My Time” Fellowship from the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow and a 2021 BIPOC Editorial Fellowship in Nonfiction from Shenandoah Literary. Say hello on Twitter @thedwmckinney or at dwmckinney.com.
Photo by Oscar Salgado