Sink & Swim

ear Saint, I write this letter to you from the balcony of my new home. The sun is casting gentle yellow flecks on the plants; a giant monstera to my right, a snake plant to my left. Owning plants is turning out to be more than just a fashionable adult hobby. I have learnt so much about myself and human relationships from caring for them. From watching my monstera suffer, its leaves yellowing from too much water, I learned that care is an act of balance and too much can be as bad as too little. From discovering its stems were folding because I used a too-small pot, I learned that intimacy can be suffocating if space is not given.

The snake plant is faring better. Despite my worst instincts as a new plant parent, it insisted on staying alive. Now that I have learnt to water it well, it is actually flourishing. To revive the monstera, transforming its yellows back to green, I got a bigger pot, changed the soil, and learnt not to over-water it. This monstera has taught me to give only what is needed. From the snake I am learning that resilience is useful, necessary even, but it is not meant to be a long-term strategy.

I named the plants after us. You are like the snake. Strong and handsome, resourceful, and capable of more strength than most. Beautiful and alive even within conditions that would break others. I am a monstera, requiring close watch, sensitive and prone to alternating between wilting and flourishing. Somehow, we make a great pair. I knew it when we first met. I knew it when I discarded my normal rules for decorum and boldly declared that I would snatch you from your then-best friend. I have no regrets about that. I never will.

When I left Nigeria, I was afraid that the distance would cast a dark aura and suffocate the care out of our relationship till we became friends on paper and nothing more. I am glad that distance has proved to be irrelevant to our bond. We never leave messages unanswered. Ever. I don’t have many people in my life who create that kind of space for me. And somehow, we always pick up where we left off, no matter how much time has passed. After all these years of friendship, we still have not run out of things to tell each other. I believe it is because of our natures, designed to pull richness into our lives. You described us once as suns, casting magnificence and discomfort over people whether we mean to or not. Even if we both spent a year in the quietest town in the world, our chats would still brim with detail.

Saint, I want you to read this letter, knowing it is just for you, with no expectation of a response this time. I write it, picturing you at your posh little bungalow with the orange walls, on a day when you have washed the city and its snark off you, your hair an unbraided cloud. I see you holding the printout of this letter, reading and smiling through your thick glasses, sitting in the tan chair you named after yourself because you designed it and managed to get a woodworker in Lagos to build it. I want the words to sit with you, seep into your sleep and keep your dreams warm. I am writing this to celebrate our relationship. Saint, they don’t make friendships like ours often.

How would we describe ourselves to strangers? A queer man and woman committed to a life-long platonic relationship. I do not speak for all heterosexual people, but my experience of them makes me believe that they hold onto tragic categories of affection. When I talked about you to other men in Lagos, they heaved and squinted, unable to comprehend the idea of a love that embraced the intensity without any of the romance.

“You guys never hooked up?” they always asked, lips splitting from incredulity.
“No, never,” I would reply with a smile.
“Really? So why do you call him your soulmate?”
You told me to start responding with, “Because he is.” Even here and now, halfway across the world, it always shuts things down.

It worked the same way with straight women. They understood the “gay bestie” aspect of our connection, but not the soulmate aspect. I never told you this, but I shared with some of my female friends that I was going to raise children with you because you would make a healthier father than any man I had loved romantically. Every single time, fervent head shaking followed, like chickens trying to burrow into their necks and failing.

I think a lot about why you believe our relationship confuses people. You said it is because they envy our lack of artificial limits. We are very physically affectionate but not sexual; we label ourselves soulmates but enter romantic relationships with other people. We are the loudest advocates for each other's careers. We plan to be neighbors if we live long enough to be old and retired. None of this makes sense to most of the people around us. I like that we have done what is best for us anyway: we took society’s story, dissolved it and wrote a new one.

After all, what truly stops a man and a woman from cultivating a deep platonic bond, besides a bunch of rules some dead people created and living people continue to legitimize? You and I were not born free, but we took our freedom because we never listened to those people. We have never been afraid to tear through convention while other people have embraced it till they choked on it, dying silently. They celebrated acceptable milestones and embraced public goodwill, all while crying in private. You and I held hands instead, wrapped our heads and bodies in burlap and made the journey through the thicket of societal barriers. We have bled and fallen, but we have survived everything.

We survived family. Your mother’s habit of choosing men over her children could have shaped you into the countless men we've seen, who spend their lives seeking the softness they were robbed of in all the wrong corners of the city. Instead, your wound turned into an eye, and you gifted yourself with the ability to see people so clearly it felt spiritual to experience. Nobody possesses greater social intelligence than you. I, on the other hand, survived my mother’s lifelong abusive attempts to make me into the ideal muslim girl, even after I told her the things that respectable hijab-wearing women did when they thought no one was looking.

We survived friends. You overcame the secondary school bullies and sex offenders who grew up into adults desperate for a crumb of your individualism. Reaching out with poorly worded Facebook messages to reconnect, thinking their abuse was evidence of a close relationship you once held with them. I survived men grooming me under the guise of friendly mentorship and peers telling me my lifestyle was a ticket to disgrace and hellfire. My essays about them will see the light of day, one day.

We survived our lovers. Remember the time when we were both suffering from the consequences of loving selfish people? We normally had heartbreaks on different schedules. But this syncing up of emotional pain was necessary to cement our bond. You with Kunle and his relentless cheating. Kunle who, adding salt to wound, asked to borrow one million naira for his failing business. Me with my double dose of pain; the millionaire tech lesbian with a drug habit she wanted to share with me, and Harry the aristocrat whose fantasy was to wife me into submission.

These people really thought we endured heaven and hell side by side to end up in gilded cages. But after them, we decided we were done. We burnt all of our leftover desire to fit in, and drank the ash with milk.

Remember the night we said our final goodbyes to convention? It felt better than any drugs that fucker ever gave me. Sober on the beach, both of us wearing the same t-shirt that said, “nothing and everything”, we talked about growing up under expectations. We’d been expelled into the world with extensive instructions on how to be adequate humans. Placed on the bottom of a ladder that sank almost as fast as we ran, we were expected to climb till the hallowed summit where nothing could harm us anymore. Every rung was an expectation; what to study, who to be friends with, where to work, who to love. All for the shrinking possibility of a vanguard that held only promises of wealth, but no freedom.

I can't swim, but I walked into the water with you. I let myself float while you held my legs. I let go because I had you. You told me that when you stopped struggling and trying to win over the water, you found holes shaped like yourself in the waves and became a diving creature completely at ease in the elements. It sounded like a metaphor for everything we had been through. Even though it hurt, we chose ourselves. We chose freedom.

By then, we understood that freedom does not come painless, that blood is a rite of passage, and pain is necessary to life. That our seemingly inhuman desire to be free comes from a simple place. We have no choice but to be ourselves, because the cost of truth is easier to bear than the cost of falsehoods, even when that cost feels like stones in our pockets threatening to drag and keep us underwater. We always swam back up, happy, wounded and sweaty, our skins pickled with scars like ancient runes, telling stories meant to only be read by those worthy. That night at the beach, we rolled in the sand and let it exfoliate us. We let the saltwater drag our hair over our foreheads as we drank soda, dancing and laughing like we were on something stronger. We embraced our capacity to love and to live in a fucked-up world.

Saint, I’ve been thinking about capacity a lot these days, because what I always thought improbable has happened. Lightning has struck twice, and I have met a person who is expanding my capacity in unforeseen ways. My heart is mutating with pleasure, my body stretching from new delights gifted to me by life. Saint, I’m in love.

You know the details of the early days, so I won’t rehash too much. I purposefully kept the rest of it to myself because I wanted to be confident in the legitimacy of this person. I want to share everything with you now, because I am as sure of his role in my life as I am of yours. Like you, our partnership happened on a timeline that would be considered quick to many people. Like you, I have no regrets about the intensity with which our affection blossomed and continues to.

In comparison to every other romantic encounter I've experienced and shared with you, this one may sound underwhelming. I am not alternating between dizzying joy and paralyzing sadness. I am calm, I feel safe. I have shown up as nothing but myself and continue to. Remember when I told you that I was rejoining the apps to build a roster of bodies to keep me warm for the approaching winter? We talked about keeping my expectations low given the explicitly casual nature of my needs. Every swipe was nonchalant; I didn’t bother to read too many details. I was only looking for an easy quality in the pictures.

I swiped on him because he smiled in all his photos, and he didn’t seem preoccupied with posing in the ways men are told to pose to seem sexy. He didn't bite his lips or try to squint his eyes, put his hands in his pockets or look away smiling at an unseen thing. His photos were taken at fun moments. At a wedding laughing with his friend; laying on the grass in a group hug holding a half-drunk glass of liquor. He seemed easy and, crucially, low maintenance.

Our first date was dinner. It was lovely and devoid of the butterflies I associated with meeting new prospects. Instead, it felt like catching up with an old friend. Everything about the encounter was soft, comforting. When he dropped me off at home, we kissed outside my door while the sky drizzled on us. I invited him into my bed the next night. Being with him felt like God was telling me, “If everything else in your life is off-kilter, this thing will not be.” I straddled him, he flipped me, fingers, legs, and tongues tangled, and before it was over, we agreed to repeat sessions. Two nights after, we laughed over multiple episodes of The Good Place while lavender candles glowed nearby.

It has been a year now. God’s promise is still in place.

We just found a place together. For the past few months we have spent more time together than apart, alternating between our apartments. Our days are charmingly muted. We work remotely on most days. He makes me eggs with cheese and lettuce for breakfast without fail. We take turns to walk the dog and laugh at his snores when he naps. I make dinner. I’ve ruined his appetite for American food with quality African seasoning. When things get more sensual, there are the expected grunts and moans. But there are also affirmations. “You’re beautiful” “I love you” “you’re amazing”. There is crass humor; “you dumb cow” “bite me”, dramatic gasps for comic relief. There is mocking, “I can’t believe I’m in love with you.” There are terrible and tender names; “my angel pooh, my sub-Saharan queen”. There are fervent expletives, a new language created when we examine the limits of pleasure on each other. There is a long groan as he comes and comes and comes. In me, pleasure emerges softer, a long sigh as my muscles clench and release with confidence that the magician on top of me, beside me, is in full capacity. He is 31 years old. Passionate about public service like me. Agile with curly black hair and skin that shifts from rosy to yellow based on how much sun comes out. Always seeing me. My fellow bisexual comrade, who enjoys trading stories about the harmful men and women we’ve tangled with and survived.

It feels like having a dream I never had come true. It is a haphazard experience. It enchants and destabilizes at the same time. When I fell in love, no one told me that my capacity for anger would grow in tandem with my widening heart. At random moments I would eyeball him and feel my veins bursting and a nose leak threatening to emerge. I was angry at myself. I had been brave enough to step outside societal confines in my career, my friendships and my beliefs. Yet I remained mostly beholden to convention in my love life. He came into my life and made a mockery of all my past lovers. The ones I was told to shapeshift for. The ones that all the advice columns and books were about, who needed women to be beautiful, amenable and non-threatening.

Every day, I wanted to ask what kind of audacity let him love me so openly and freely? I raged at the universe too. Why did it wrap up my tangled quest for love with such profound peace? My heart kept trying to reject the notion of it. The anger remains with the love, but it lessens every day, giving way to acceptance. I deserve ease and I embrace it. My life is a paradise. I have you and I have him, two beautiful queer men who see me, affirm me, and love me in distinct and powerful ways.

I started this letter about you, and it will end with you. If we never met, never cared for each other's pain, never danced in the sea and let it wash away our baggage, I would have succumbed to convention, desperate to fulfill what was expected of me. My life would be different. If I had gone the way they expected me to, I would be writing to you from a grand and ugly house, clothed in draping silk, smelling of expensive oud, drawing frenetic pictures of a life relegated to my imagination and receding to a point of muteness. I would write to you as a beautiful empty doll who had done everything they wanted and lost everything she was. You would not even be you. I would be writing to an idea of you, built in my head. Instead, thankfully, I am writing to you. In a sixth floor apartment with big windows brimming with summer sunlight, smelling of lavender candlesticks and full of too much dog hair. I write to you naked as the day I came to the world, the body of my love a fingertip away. I write to you and see the ladder I have willingly let go of. I am falling and falling, inching closer to the mulch. Shedding the expectations in bigger doses. My lover's hand in mine. Ready to dive into the divine and the painful. And stay there.

Yours,

A.