2
It’s been a lot of weeks since the first time I met Cadence. And I find that the initial courage for life-living that my experience with Cadence gave me has died down since then. With Cadence, I learned that lying to live well is permissible because all of life is in itself a gigantic façade that can be poked through and made to crumble with a single sneeze. Cadence had thought me to reach for friendship with brave gestures, hoping that they will reciprocate with equally daring acts of friendshipping. Cadence had thought me the pleasure of strutting about life as if it belonged to me because it does really belong to me and I can do with life as I please.
In retrospect, I forgot about all those lessons upon returning to Tuscaloosa and finding out yet again that my life is not in my hands but in the hands of those who make decisions about my livelihood and those whose day-in-day-out activities influenced my own living practices. I feel fatigue just thinking about friendship and companionship in the poetic, gospel way it came to me while in Atlanta. And how do I know I have lost my flair for living life with high esteem for myself and my inherent potential for making darlings out of moments?
It is in the little things.
The morning of May 10th, I am walking back from a stroll that had been designed to help me get rid of the dreary feeling that had consumed me from having a long overdue confrontation with a friend. I encountered a boy/man standing over his bike making repairs. This is not the first time I am meeting him. I contemplated for a split second on whether to say hello. I didn’t. Because I was scared. Before I passed by his line of vision, he looked up at me, smiled, and say hello. With relief, I responded with a hi.
He was the second person that I had been scared to say hello to first during the short span of my stroll.
When have I never been the first to say hi? Lately. Lately, the world has been challenging my right to possess it freely and fully. And I have been succumbing. I am believing less in how much pleasure can be derived from life.
There is a particular instance where my brain twitched at the thought that black women could both be going through levels of oppression and still find space to be genuinely happy, to feel pleasure wholesomely. It was at a talk given by Tara Bynum, an early African American pleasure scholar. She was making a case about how Phyllis Wheatley and her friend Obour Tanner found pleasure in their company, writing letters to themselves from far away, keeping their letters for years (at least this was the case for Obour who lived way longer than Phyllis), and passing them on to trustworthy people. Dr. Tara noted that these women – Christian, formerly enslaved, patriarchally belabored – shared secrets with themselves and spoke firsthand with each other about life-changing decisions they intended to make, thus nurturing a joy within themselves that withstood the oppressive crises of the moment. All through the talk, I found a wave of skepticism washing over me; I couldn’t help but nurse doubts about the possibility of feeling full of joy even when life is not fully committed to ensuring your joy.
I asked questions about whether Phyllis and Obour’s religious commitment which, for the most part, is due to indoctrination did not color the said pleasure derived from their friendships… What of the fact that these women were subservient to white masters who were rooted in a society that used their sources of happiness (writing for instance) as avenues to dehumanize them? Shouldn’t the treatment they received from society be enough to have killed every joy in them? To say they derived pleasure from exchanging letters, isn’t this a case of counting their pleasures in grains?
These questions were foolhardy, I knew. Two truths can co-exist. They could have been feeling choked by the oppression but they would have had little pleasures in their lives that no one could deny them. My questions rose out of my growing fear that life might be antithetical to joy. Of lately, some days in 2023 reify this thought.
I distract myself too much from the matter at hand: Cadence. Before lately, before the consuming fear of being on the blind side of pleasure and rhapsody as I live life, there was Cadence.
Still remember the train and Atlanta? I hope you do.
After the train, there was an Uber ride filled with awkward silence and a nervous feel for the road-filled landscaping of Atlanta. Atlanta has roads. One too many. Roads leading to roads that lead to more roads. Roads on bridges, roads along alleys and streets, roads in parks, roads that cut into skyscrapers and veer into foresty parts with more connecting roads into ginormous residential buildings, roads in the minds of people closed off to form a cul de sac, opened freely to allow for a lingering attachment to a slide fest of graffitied imaginations. The awkward silence that came with the Uber ride was broken off when the fine driver ceremoniously led me directly to the hostel I had booked to stay the night.
The hostel = ekStasis!
Although the booking site had depicted the hostel as one whose chi is Holy Mary and the cross, the first sight that greeted me as I cornered the porch was fine-ass boho youths smoking joints and trading laughter. It was too midnight and I was too tired, but my eyes could still process the history of the faces that I encountered as I walked through the lovingly decorated space, showered for a minute, and sunk into the bed. There was the orange girl dressed in one of those bohemian palazzo pants and tight tank tops, I think, with a name as complexly simple as her beautiful peach face, reddened from smoke and skinship maybe. She was kind, I was girl-smitten. The Russian girl with brown hair as curious as her eyes could have been her sister if she was shorter and more storky; they sway the same way, you see. Then, there was the boy I saw briefly whom I think compliment her beautifully with his yellowness, lanky frame, and dripping boyish essence. I don’t care too much about remembering the boy’s face; he might be true for her but he is regular to me. The face I wish I had seen more before I drowned in sleep was the black girl lying on the bed adjacent to me with thick, chocolate thighs holding up a laptop with which she was watching a movie rather noiselessly. Her hair was full of hair, afro hair, and from the length sprawling out on the bed, it was clear she was tall, a tall jar of chocolate.
I spent just one night at the hostel so I didn’t get to interact with any of the boho youths. In fact, the person I saw as I shuffled around the living space, tying my shoes, preparing breakfast, and getting ready to hop out into the day was a completely different person.
Cadence.
She had a low buzz cut that stood out on her head because of the plain PJ she was wearing. She was watching a paint gun battle on her phone with such straight attention but that did not stop her from saying hello and holding me down with her wavy cross eyes as soon as I came in. I honestly don’t know how we managed to push beyond the awkwardness that comes with initial contact, but we did, and rather quickly too. It must have had something to do with Cadence’s flair for shafting through small talk and moving on to the big things. She asked me what I was in Atlanta for. “Conferencing and visa application,” I told her. She used this as a springboard to not just tell me why she was in Atlanta but what she was all about.
“I am here for work,” she had said.
She is a CEO who is in Atlanta to secure deals. Her life, she went on to establish, is one entwined with complicated geographies.
“I have been all around the world,” she told me in a long drawl while I sat and gulped down my food.
“I am Russian,” she continued. “I was born in Russia but I have lived everywhere, everywhere in the worrrldd.”
I can’t remember all the places she said she has been to but it’s a lot – from Europe to the Middle East to all the parts of America that I have only heard on people’s lips. As the names of the countries she has been to rolled off her lips, so did my amusement at her eagerness to prove her well-travelledness to me. But I don’t exactly think it was her well-travelledness she was pointing out (being one to quickly bring up places I have been, I can easily tell if a person is a wanderlust-er like me), it was to show how much of life her flesh has consumed, how far-stretched her skin was beyond the space of existing, it was to steal the magic in my eyes of wonderment as she spoke and knot it into a cord of affirmation, one she can wear proudly about her body. I gave her the needed affirmation. I am not stingy. I also seek validation, in other ways.
Seeing that I was really into her worldbuilding, Cadence followed me around as I moved through the Hail-Mary-Boho-Colorful-Hippie space of ekStasis, telling me stories about living in Russia with her dad, then traveling to war-ridden regions of the world, visiting London, and cruising in Dubai before coming back to Dallas or Denver or Delaware or Detroit or one of those other D- American cities to be a CEO. She has been trying to strike a deal with a transportation company in Atlanta, but they had been testing her patience like crazy. She was bound for another appointment, and she hoped this time for a positive result. She would have weaved in a few more ready-made worlds into the story of her lively experiences had someone else not walked in.
This someone is the Jamaican girl who I found to be I and Cadence’s missing rib. Together, we made a powerful trio. I didn’t know that immediately of course just as I didn’t know I would be seeing Cadence again after leaving ekStasis. She had said something about us hanging out but for someone who spun worlds out of her imagination like shearing wool off a sheep’s back, I thought I, Funmi, was merely an NPC in a perfectly constructed alternative space where she posed as the Belle of “U”.
All that was clear at the time was I liked the Jamaican girl’s energy; she was sporty and muscularly beautiful to a fault. She also had the bubbly positive vibes of an Afro-optimist like me. She rode with me in my Lyft as I found my way to the heart of the city to seek out the people I had come to meet.
The J girl (whose name should rightly stay where it mostly belongs – with her) spoke about coming to Atlanta on vacation from a job she loved but hated still for its significant frustrating moments. She had been staying with a friend but felt she needed a bit of private space, so she opted for the cheap hostel which, she said, did not offer her the privacy she craved.
“The place is okay for the price but there is no space where you can be alone. There is people everywhere. It’s good to interact but sometimes you just want to be alone. They should have created a little space for that, you know?”
I knew. I understood. We also spoke about Jamaica as a prospective touristy location.
“Jamaica soo good to visit but everyone is so chill. Jamaicans take their time to do anything, even with work. It can be annoying for some tourists.”
We laughed over some similarities in this regard between Nigeria and Jamaica,
“Nigerians don’t send anybody too. They can have a customer standing in front of them and still be talking to a gist partner close by or by their side. If you like vex, it is for your own pocket. But Nigerians are hustlers sha.”
As we parted, I knew I wanted to see her again; she had the kind of voice, the kind of smile, the kind of accent, the kind of poise that reminded me of how beautiful black is. Sometimes, the world makes me forget. I found a good reminder in her.
It was in maintaining contact with her that I happened to see Cadence again. We met in front of the Sky View where we cocooned into a group, took pictures, and rode the Ferris wheel riding on the back of motors dangling us in the air and Cadence’s fear of heights. She had paid the fees that made it possible for us to sit in one of the tiny boxes on the above-ground wheel. Such kindness but she couldn’t bear to bask comfortably in the airborne beauty she had purchased for us. J Girl and I amused her with our confidence, our questions about where lies what, our trust in our ability to see the fun in being hung 200 ft above ground despite the fact that we wanted more off-the-ground spins, more height, more high. Cadence, in turn, sustained the humor with stories about her panic attacks riding the Ferris wheels in other countries – the London eye in the UK, Ain Dubai in UAE, and one more I can’t place my memory on. The ones she didn’t ride, she saw at least. I told her of the eyes I have seen as well, just two actually – the eye in Budapest and the eye in London.
Drats, I forgot to mention the one at the Prater amusement park in Vienna.
Cadence called us her uncle so her fear could both be authenticated and her story about going on business appointments to “secure deals” and then riding Sky View days before, without us, with raging alcohol in her system could be affirmed. The uncle was sweet, kind like her but he was, as against the impression Cadence would have wanted him to exhibit, full of concern for her.
How was the appointment she had had, he asked.
She somehow missed it and would go tomorrow, or she didn’t miss it and would go tomorrow, something was said by Cadence. I didn’t care enough about their exchange; I was sky-high on dopamine bought by someone else. By the end of the communal uncle-call and before the end of the wheel ride, Cadence had collected our thoughts for later in her mind and decided for us that we would go drinking. Be early drunks.
Amidst giggles and dusting off dregs of fear, we found our way to a bar very close to Sky View, one that looked like a reserve of the kinds of bar planted in resorts on the Maldives. We took more fun pictures with the vacay props inside the bar/restaurant and headed to the front of the bar to sit on the high stools like hot babes in movies do. Except that we are babes whose hotnesses have yet to break out into movies. J Girl and I got a floaty strawberry-mango juice thingy – mine virgin, hers sauced with a bit of rum. Cadence got herself a real drink and as we sipped on our drinks on high stools too tall for our moderate-to-short legs, we started spilling thoughts like wine. It was there I got to know my fellow unbreakoutintomovies hot babes.
Cadence spoke about having a life in New Orleans, not the has-been-everywhere kind of life but the this-is-where-I-call-home sort of life. She is living this life with an older partner whom she plans to ditch. “Why,” we asked. “Just because…” she responded.
He loves her, no doubt, even with her offbeat wanderlusting, and CEO persona, he loves her. His son does too; he calls out her name when she comes to play with him on sand and the older older boy on sand too and everywhere else. But ewwwww, love, who still needs that in a relationship these days? Not if there are travels to be crafted into fine Dipper chants whose hum-ding harmony perch around the mouth quite nicely. Not if there are friends to be made on the untraversed trails of Margaritas and sob stories ly-ing in sight. Not if the partner is older older, 50-something older, and somehow has managed to not fuck (up) a 30-year-old despite the virgin wetness that lies in between her lips, the other ones, the closed ones.
Cadence, she drinks a lot. But she does not talk half as intoxicatingly as J Girl, at least not when the matter of The Doctor is concerned. You see, J Girl works as a front desk receptionist for a nice doctor whom she thinks is too nice to his patients, nice to the point of overworking him. The Nice Doctor treats Nose, Eyes, and Ears, and he takes his time with each patient, sorting through their goiters and ear pusses and cataracts, staying past his office hours, and just existing, breathing to see his patient well. But the patients, ungrateful entitled needypeople. Just wanting and wanting and not allowing rest for the doctor with a private practice, a job at a public hospital, and a professorial/mentorship position at a university. No respect for a hardworking man.
I wonder if she knew with the glee in her eyes when she talked about Nice Doctor that she had a thing for him. A big thing in fact. No matter how nice a doctor is, I don’t think it should inspire such a spirited glow from a beautiful diva who won’t even stop to take a sip of her drink while airing her exuberant commentaries. But she didn’t talk about like or love once when mentioning Nice Doctor, not even when she talked about other men she dated who were too young to be taken seriously, too old to not take themselves seriously. I had no intention as it was to lump my own assumption into her near-hallelujah choruses about Nice Doctor.
I mean, J Girl looked like she was old enough to know love. But hey, I am 26, still, the concept of love eludes me. Sometimes I think I have it but many times it turns out all I have is my gut feeling running wild on cheap fantasy.
When they look to me to say love-life things or things for lack of love, I spew out my berserk gut feeling and watch them take it in without any look of disgust or irritation on their face. Fellow unbreakoutintomovies hot babes stick together, don’t they!
We went from concocting love gist to looking through the merch of the fancy made-for-resort bar/restaurant. J Girl was pretty excited about their squeaky turtle and Cadence wanted a piece of everything – from the squishy bottle holder to a fluffy dolphin teddy or bear teddy whose image sinks like stone in water in my memory. We galloped to the nearby centennial park and my gut feeling leaped a tad when J Girl saw the colorful Olympic rings and started moving mouth breathlessly about Usain Bolt. Just about anything could get her excited, it seemed. Cadence’s voice drowned hers in good time; she just had to tell us about her days as an Olympic athlete, a runner in fact.
In her excited recounting of those glorious days running relay? Sprinting? A marathon? She told us literally not figuratively that her name was part of the many names engraved into the stone tiles of the park. We shouldn’t look for it of course because that would put her in an uncomfortable position.
Then, she cussed on the bloody African who had stood in the way of her winning the gold medal at the running thingy. This person was an African, a thoroughly black person like me, nationality not disclosed.
“Must have been a Kenyan person,” I said, to loosen up the “how dare you” near gasp plastered on J Girl’s face. The cadence of my tone as I said these words was not lost on J Girl – Cadence is friend, fellow unbreakoutintomovies hot babe, she can do no such wrong… that is not such wrongdoing.
Her recounted lively experience about being an Olympic athlete could have fit right into her Belle-U worldbuilding if her whole world wasn’t weighed down by Pando, the terrifically electrifying source of energy that charges up her brain, her whole body but wraps around her heart and puts it in freeze mode, puts her legs in circuit-shock mode too so that they limp and loop into themselves when she tries to run.
Pando is my own term for understanding cerebral palsy and the way it works on the body, her body. Just as there is Pando, there are reapers. Reapers are the antibodies, the worlds Cadence builds into her heart to keep them from totally falling into numbness. But to my naked eyes, the reapers are devastatingly creepy.
*Yes, these are analogies from Disney’s Strange World.*
Even as Cadence runs around the park displaying her limp-loop running as an exhibit of her Olympian strength, I cheer her on like a fan in celebration of Bolt-reborn. I don’t understand the workings of the reapers, the worldbuilding crawly crawlies in her mind but I don’t fight them. Cadence’s legs can run and win a whole goddamn race if the Reapers say they can.
I have my own Reapers.
J Girl gets Cadence too. During our little time together, she didn’t cheer or nod but she smiled, as wide as her pretty Afro-optimist teeth could allow.
I knew just how much the friendship of us powerful trio meant to her when we laid on the grass in the park and talked about sun, suffering, and soulfulness in our corners of the world while Cadence stood ahead, talking to important work people on the phone.
We knew just how much the friendship of us powerful trio meant to Cadence when she agreed to go with us to the National Center for Civil and Human Rights despite the fact that she was thirsty to have an experience at the Coca-Cola factory. She couldn’t face the long hand of history that ticked in a forward row at the museum, but she tagged along nonetheless. We couldn’t deal with the ticking heavy hand of history as well but at least we could pretend to have stamina against historical un-time/ru-liness. She couldn’t so when we got to the hand of the clock bloodied with martyrs and chiming away with the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. whose cursive accent was heavy with the words, “A riot is the language of the unheard”, she drifted away from us into her own world of phones calls with busy people who take up so much of her own time that her phone, her whole frame of mind had to be recharged.
She found us again though. At Hooters where we were feasting on fries, chicken, and shrimp. Having Afro-optimist conversations about families and political independences. She ordered the kid-sized meal and a non-virgin drink. Pando needs its nutrients. There wasn’t much more world she had to pour onto our laps; she just wanted to enjoy the company of two people who had left her to follow the long hand of history; two people who couldn’t keep up with her own world(s) and had gone to find theirs in the thick fog of uncivil wrongs against their kinds, in a long-ing walk filled with talks about the Messianic symbolism of Martin Luther. We were sorry about leaving her. She was quick to forgive us. After all, the friendship of us powerful trio meant a lot to her. After Hooters, I broke up the trio with a goodbye that was a bit too breathless for the breadth of the bond we had woven around ourselves.
Quick hugs, quick hand squeezes, quick good-God-where-is-my-charger, and oh-here-is-it, a quick reminisce on the spot in case we all forget to remember our powerful trio-ness.
J Girl, I might never see again. But Cadence, “Yes, yes, we will see in Birmingham when I come for work. Yes, definitely yes. I will come to Birmingham for work so we will see,” she said this.
A week after Atlanta, she sent me a line about being in New Orleans “for a bit”. Two days after her message, I asked, “When do you intend to come to Birmingham?”. Her answer: “Hey, I was just there actually. For work.”
…