Do you remember the café?
There have been so many—we’ve said goodbye in about eighteen and three quarters of them. This time we were in Williamsburg, I think. The morning after the hotel. Was it the night before, when we sobbed in an alley? You can’t breathe when you cry; globs of mucus crowd your passages and you always have to blow your nose. Your sadness was always choking that way. The alley was particularly abject, so I suggested a hotel. I used to think of glass windows in penthouses and your fantasies whenever I thought of hotels. I’d imagine us years from now, in KL or HCMC, pressed against the panes and still in love. (Are you still in love?) Now, when I think of hotels, I think of you lying to me in bed, in the Hilton that wasn’t a Hilton. I think of you in my apartment, pacing as I ask you if you slept with her at your house. No, you said. At hers? No, you said, somewhere else. Where? A hotel room.
Looking back, I think you’re lying, but this wasn’t meant to be the point. I found a note you wrote for me in the café that morning. It was folded and browning in the suitcase I lived out of that year. It broke my heart as thoroughly as if my heart had been whole to start with.
You are loved. Right now. There is someone (me) building in their heart a house for you. This house is neither fictional nor imaginary. It is a place built around the things we share. Right now. It is the place where I feel like the opposite of amputation . . . Terrors need time to quicken. We are a terror . . . I love you.
I wonder if we have been separate terrors to each other rather than a unit of terror scalding through the world. Today, in therapy, I had an epiphany, the kind of thing I would have texted you about afterward. I told my therapist about when we first fell in love, why I couldn’t let you go, how my world cracked and bled every time I tried to. And you know I tried to. It would’ve been best for us, and I wanted so badly to do what was best for us. The only reason I don’t beat myself up about it now is because you taught me it was okay not to be perfect, that I was still lovable even though I didn’t know how to give you the space you needed without falling apart myself.
“It’s better now, right?” I asked you, a week or two before we died.
You said a few words—ones I don’t remember, because they were eclipsed by the ones that came after. “I can’t say it’s better now,” you told me, “because I cannot fix my face to say it was ever bad.” My magician, full of grace. We didn’t know how to love each other well at first, but I thought we had forever to try.
My therapist’s tiny curls are blond and tight to her skull. Her lipstick and nails are always impeccable. She crossed her legs and sipped some water from a steel cup with a straw in it. “All relationships end,” she said, and it shouldn’t have punched me in the chest the way that it did, but somehow there I was anyway, sitting on her couch with a stricken solar plexus. She kept talking, and I masked my face to look like a listening, but really I was turning the words over in my head, staring at their underbelly, trying to figure out why they cut so much. I remember the first time I realized someone could stop being your friend, when I was seventeen and in my sophomore year of college. My closest friend there was a Jamaican runner who could’ve been a model. She transferred to another school and was gone, just like that. I was so lost, so sad. I thought friendships lasted forever, like me and Chioma and Julie back home. We’d known each other since we were two, lived on Ekenna Avenue for fourteen years, and we were only separated when we had to leave for college. Even then I didn’t think the distance would mean anything. I thought our bonds were immortal. I don’t speak to either of them now, but I tried for a long time.
I am finding that embodiment is deeply traumatic, in no small part because of how it changes time. Imagine being ọgbanje, like me. Imagine always being part of a cohort, unbound by the decay of flesh. Sixteen thousand years old, at an estimate. Maybe that’s just where memory stops, or as far back as we can see. It’s a measure of time that conveys timelessness while pretending to be finite. You are never alone. You are partnered with spirits like you, making small trips into bodies but always coming back. And then this embodiment happens, this violent birth ripping you away from home, and you aren’t allowed to return. Instead, you’re kept in a mortal form, subject to mortal rules (except for the ones you shatter, because you are still you). It’s bad enough to be in an impermanent form, but the way time is corrupted goes much further than that. People don’t know how to spin immortality. They are in violent flux; their bonds are not like the bonds you have with your brothersisters. You keep learning and forgetting this lesson, in wrenching directions. Your relationship with your human father ends. So does the one with your human brother. The one with your human mother is fraying. You thought family was immortal, and they are not. People die and keep being alive somewhere else, away from you. You thought friendships were immortal—never mind that you were a child then. They are not.
We are still imagining together; all these yous are me. I’m losing persons.
Impermanence is a cruel lesson to teach a god. It says that something is not possible, which doesn’t make sense if you’re a thing like me, because of course everything is possible. Have you tried bending the world to make it happen? Oh, I forgot, your magic doesn’t stretch that far. No matter. Like I said, time is corrupted here, and perhaps by corrupted, I mean that it exists in the first place, what a violence. It’s made by measuring it, delineating it. Can you make a thing exist by caging it? Does it only exist in the cage? If you destroy the cage, what happens? Impermanence is a bastard outshoot of what humans have done to time. I keep forgetting that I’m in flesh, that it is slow and prone to injury, that so much of embodiment is defined by limits. Horrible, nasty little things, limits. Unnatural.
I wasn’t meant to exist like this, but I am on assignment and since these humans have collared time and created ends, then this too will end and I will go home to my brothersisters and it won’t even feel like forever, because what is forever when there is no concept of anything else, a world with no end.
I keep forgetting.
“All relationships end,” she said, and I flinched. I didn’t know. I knew some ended, but in my head, I was holding out for a partnerspirit. I was waiting for an entity who would never leave me. I had learned to accept impermanence from other people: family, friends, a husband even. I knew the drill. Love them anyway; enjoy the time you have with them; just because it might end doesn’t mean you have to be afraid. If anything, love them harder for that. But, I confess, I am terribly stubborn. Drag me into these human cells all you want; I still remember that I’m missing a cohort. I still believe I can bend the world into what I want. I have been trying to create immortality, bonds like the one I lost when I incarnated. I thought all I needed was another god. I thought you had enough power.
Every time I accepted impermanence with other people, I simply transferred the expectation of immortality to a partnerspirit who doesn’t even exist yet. I see now how that might have been too heavy. Like I said, I forget the constraints of this world. It genuinely didn’t occur to me that it was impossible until she told me they all end, and I thought, Fuck. She said it like a rule, you see, a rule of this world, and she was right. That’s the whole fucking point of mortality, that there are ends. My god, the things these assholes have done with time. There are no forevers.
I forgot.
I thought I would find a partnerspirit and we would spin immortality, and to be honest, I thought they would die first, and I would die right after. That’s as close as you can get to forever here, dying together. Afterward didn’t matter, the consciousness that’s been cobbled together in this body would be lost to oblivion. The dead ọgbanje goes home to its brothersisters. Playtime starts again, like it always does. There are forevers in our original world. I keep forgetting which world I’m in, one foot on the other side.
The note you wrote me is still full of hope, but it contains versions of us that are both ghosts now. I cry quietly in my bathroom so Katherine won’t hear it. I want to try again with you. I don’t know when to stop. I refuse the limits. I refuse the limits with you. But I am only a small god, put here by deities bigger than me, so I have to obey the limits, even as wrong as they feel. I still believe that if you worked with me, we could bend the world into anything we wanted. I wish you believed that too; it’s the first step in worldbending. I can’t believe for the both of us, and it makes me so angry and sad that you gave up. It’s never too late—that’s a human lie of time, there is no late, there is mostly now because now is so flexible, I find. You can change a whole life, a whole world, inside of a now. The change can be a ripple, but if you crack a whip and the tip breaks the air of the future, the handle is still in your hand now, don’t you see? This is how gods shape reality.
I thought you had enough power. I keep forgetting.
That’s why I couldn’t let you go, my burning and crashing magician, because I expected you to stay forever, so every time you stepped away, my head went mad with abandonment. The threat of an end, even a temporary one—what does temporary mean, distance is distance, a bond severed is a bond severed, what is this human back-and-forth, my cohort lived in everlasting before the things done to time gave that any meaning. I cannot survive the thought of ends, of being alone. I accepted it with other people like a trade. Fine, give me these transient ones, but for the weight of their fickleness, I will counterbalance with a partnerspirit who will feed me immortality. I think the humans would call that codependence, but that’s because they have ends and separations and all kinds of unnaturalness. I’m not saying that’s wrong. You have to bend to some of a world’s rules, even if you bend worlds. There is an order to things, but I forgot.
I couldn’t let you go because you were supposed to be immortal, with me. All relationships end, she said, and for the first time it occurred to me that perhaps I cannot bend immortality into this world the way I thought I could. There will be no everlasting partnerspirit, no embodied brothersister in this dimension re-creating the bond we had on the other side. These might be rules I can’t break. It hadn’t occurred to me; the impossible rarely does. I was terrified that I’d end up alone—but terrified because I thought the chance was slim, not that it didn’t fucking exist. This is all so unbelievably heartbreaking, the way I’ve been waiting for an incarnation to find me. I can’t tell you how many lifetimes of grief flashed through me, mournings stacked on mournings, shimmering and then dying because impossible things can’t draw much of a breath. How could I forget that even if I’m not human, I’m still mortal, and that always means ends, many small deaths? Forever doesn’t exist in this world. I thought you were forever; have I been breaking my own heart?
The other day, Eloghosa told me that nobody is coming to save us. I told her about the sadness I used to have with you. I’m sure you remember the thousand tearful times I wailed that you weren’t coming to get me. I felt like a bedraggled kitten out in the rain, a child forgotten somewhere, that part of me that’s stranded, abandoned, and someone needs to come get me. I used to trace it back to my human mother leaving us when I was eight, but I was wrong.
I was born, and no one’s come to take me home. Embodiment is the stranding. I am marooned in flesh. I am alone, but I keep waiting for them to come and take me back, I keep trying to go home. They sent me out into the world, and I’ve fought it every step of the way, blubbering and trying to turn back. Thirty years, and I’m still trying to turn back. I’m still trying to burrow back into my mother’s scales. I’m still trying to lie down in my fatherhusband’s grave, tell him—pour the sand on me, pour the sand on me. Let me go home, let me come home. Don’t make me go out there all alone. If I couldn’t go home, I thought, maybe home would come to me, and home would be a god, home would be someone who would never leave, home would be a nonhuman who would spin immortality with me.
But I see now, especially after this last attempt to return, that I will go home eventually, yes, but first, I have a mission. I was sent here to do something, to make this work.
I can hear my brothersisters, exasperated beyond measure. It’s a short term in the larger picture, they point out, just a few decades and then you can come home, but you keep turning away, you keep crying and trying to burrow back. You have to be brave, my love, they whisper, you have to move forward. You’ve called yourself a small god. It’s time to be a big god now.
I can feel the instruction heavy on the back of my neck, the demand that I do my job. No one is coming to get me, but I’m walking toward them because home is at the end of this, home is in front of me, but I keep missing it because I keep looking back. Yes, they croon, that home is gone. It is a one-way trip, my love, you cannot undo being born, you cannot undo the body. There is no rush. It’s okay for it to be slow; you only think it’s slow because it’s flesh. A few decades are nothing, they laugh. There’s no need to destroy the body; the body is already destroying itself, the body is already dying. I take comfort in that. I am already being destroyed, I am already dying and going home, and I have work to do.
I wish I could claim my instructions were unclear, but they never are. My brothersisters are reliable messengers. Stay, they tell me, their voices overlapping. Look forward. Stop trying to run back to your parents. You’ll end up in the place you’re trying to find; you’ll get everything you want. Give in to the flesh. The cage is not a cage. It is just metal. It is just armor that is already decaying. It is rusting, it is falling away. You are dying already. You are going home.
I know you are scared. I know you feel small and alone. We are here.
There’s so much grief in me—about losing you, my magician; about mortality; about how wasteful it is for you to have been so afraid when you are just a few decades away from dying. What was the point of letting fear fuck up the little time you had left? It’s fitting that you don’t talk to me anymore. There might be other yous before me and others after, but you know the person you became when you started worshipping me, when you swore a future to me, swore a home and a heart, when I drew the sign of the cross on your forehead while you lay between my legs. That person is dead now, and I can’t bring you back. We know the rules, they’re the same across every reality: the dead can’t come back. I wish you had let yourself be a god, because then that rule wouldn’t apply, but the god I blindfolded by my bed, the god I loved, is dead—you killed him. I accept this end.
I have finally realized that in order to return to immortality, we must all die first. I look forward to it, and in the meantime it allows me to let you go, to bury you.
I leave New York and move my books and gold and clothes to the godhouse in the swamp. My apartment in Brooklyn looks so empty. Men like you have been breaking my heart in this city for ten years, and I think it’s enough. I always try to make you gods and you always fail me so terribly; so be it. Your ghost can haunt this apartment all it likes, but without me here to remember you, to see your shade, I know it will fade. I have already forgotten what it felt like to make love to you, what your face looked like in pleasure. I will forget what it was like to lie with my head on your chest and your arms around me and your heart, your large and beautiful and lying heart, beating under my skull, reminding me that you are alive. All things end.
You are no different.