by Hari Ziyad
People may laugh when I talk of your imaginary friends today, but there was something critical I can’t quite master about how you allowed Kula’s, Saia’s, and India’s love to be enough, even when they weren’t “here” in the same way as you. It ensured that there never was a competition to put a favorite above the rest. It established freedom from the expectation for them to do more emotional labor simply because they were girls and freedom to not even expect them to always be girls, as imaginary friends don’t require a static gender the way this society demands of us. I know that your love for these friends was liberating primarily because they weren’t limited by this anti-Black realm. But what does that mean for me if I can’t seem to secure an escape from this world?
If anyone can help me along my journey to mastering the tongue you spoke of love with, it’s Timothy and his cute-ass lisp. We met at a Black queer picnic hosted by a mutual friend. We were both dating other people at the time. Me casually, him not so much. We’d been friends on social media for a while. We’re both writers, and I could tell through his work that he loved Black folk, so I fucked with him. He was at the picnic with his boyfriend. I was there with my friends and roommates Ahmad and Charles.
I had never met Timothy in person and was struck when I saw him in real life. I mean I literally felt as if I’d been hit by something. More a comet than lightning. More “IthoughtIknewwhatlovewasbutwhatI knewisinadequatetodescribethisfeeling” than “love at first sight.” I legit told Charles to keep me away from Timothy because he was just too damn fine and I didn’t want to start any trouble. Charles said I was “sprung” and to this day jokingly throws my behavior at the picnic in my face whenever my fiancé comes up in conversation.
“You still sprung,” Charles laughs, and I laugh, too. Can’t deny the facts.
I could say that Timothy is the jealous type.
“I was actually mad that my ex kept talking about you after we all met,” he tells me now. The picnic was also the first time I met his then partner, and I guess I had made a little too much of an impression.
When Timothy and his ex broke up, I was still seeing the person I had been dating, so we didn’t connect on that level straightaway. After I was out of my situationship, Tim reached out to submit a piece he’d written analyzing what he’d learned about anti-Black state-sanctioned violence from living with HIV, a widely criminalized disease, to RaceBaitr. It was a brilliant piece, so I accepted it. I told him it was brilliant, and he pretended he was surprised to hear it—“OMG, thank you!”
I think our past relationships had made both of us good at pretending, and though I was sprung from the get-go, I also stunted like reading the piece didn’t make me want him even more. If you hear him tell it, I was the one who kept messaging after the piece was published. But I have receipts showing that he was the one digging me. He kept asking how I was doing and all that, like he really cared.
Eventually I told him about my problems. How my anxiety was starting to make it feel like everything was moving too fast, beating too fast, turning too fast, and I couldn’t keep up. You know, things you tell somebody when they’re used to you pretending and you’re trying to see if the truth will scare them off. At some point, he asked me out. Took me to a restaurant. Lied and said his pants ripped on the way to the place when he knew they were torn before he put them on and just wanted me to notice his thighs. His gorgeous, former-state-tracklete thighs.
I could say the rest is history, and that’s the familiar way of telling this story. But the familiar way is a lie. Love didn’t just happen, and the story’s not over yet. I no longer believe in falling in love—at least not the way the story’s usually told. Tim showed me that love is not just a feeling you get, just lightning and you have no choice but to let the static run through you. When the comet hits, you don’t always know what to let run through you.
Timothy and I don’t always know where our friends fit into the picture. We don’t always know when and where kids do. We don’t always know where everyone else does either. We are still figuring out how to manage a serodiscordant relationship—where one partner has HIV, and one partner doesn’t. How to deal with the trauma from past sexual violence that refuses to stop rearing its hideous head from time to time. We don’t always know how to best address our boundaries around monogamy and whether they should stay.
Last week, Timothy and I were watching the Amazon show Homecoming in our living room. Stephan James’s fine ass came on the screen, and I said something aloud about how Stephan James’s fine ass had just come on-screen. I had begun to notice that I felt uncomfortable stating what to me were benign observations—like my natural attractions—in front of Timothy, and so I called myself making the conscious decision to challenge what I deemed an unfairly imposed restriction around my thoughts and feelings.
He paused the show. Admitted that he felt uncomfortable, and that he knew it wasn’t fair for him to. I admitted that I don’t want to be in a relationship where I don’t feel free to witness beauty when I see it. He asked if I wanted an open relationship. I said I don’t think we are at the point where we could even consider that yet, and right now I just want us to work through this step. He pushed. I admitted that my ideal relationship would allow casual flirting with mutual agreements, but I had no desire to have sex with anyone else right now. He wondered if I was already doing that. We fought.
In the familiar way of telling this story, I could say that I won. The familiar way makes me the good person again, always. It’s the one I keep coming back to even when I say I am trying to be intentional about challenging it. It starts with “Timothy is the jealous type,” as if I hadn’t once flirted with my ex earlier in our relationship, as if Tim hadn’t seen it when I thought I was being discreet, and as if that were the same as “casual flirting with mutual agreements.” As if I weren’t priming the listener to believe my side. As if there have to be sides.
The familiar story doesn’t require me to admit that I hadn’t acknowledged how what I did earlier in the relationship had hurt him deeply, before challenging what I deemed an unfairly imposed restriction on my thoughts and feelings. It makes it seem like repairing Tim’s trust was simple. It doesn’t require I tell you that I didn’t apologize for my actions sincerely. I can pretend that I really thought him fighting me about this TV show was just about an actor neither of us will probably ever meet, and not about how I never expressed my relationship needs to someone who has been so willing to provide for them.
The truth is that Tim’s honesty about his feelings was more than I have been able to give about my struggles with love. He has given me so much time and space to come to my own messy realizations because he knows better than I that messy realizations are okay, even when I have squandered that time and space with excuses and avoidance. He has cared for me still because he still believes in me. In us.
The day after our argument, Timothy and I sat down before the TV again. He said sorry for how he responded, reminded me that this was possible. Acknowledged it wasn’t fair that he asked me a question he wasn’t ready to hear the answer to. He conceded that we can take our relationship step by step. That our love can look different—that it won’t always seem familiar, like what it’s “supposed” to be, or even feel good in every given moment. Said that he knows he has insecurities, and that he is working on them. He asked if that was okay, but now I can understand that this wasn’t really the question. Now I can understand that he was really asking if I was willing to keep working, too.
Timothy is always showing me how to love in better ways. How to love without needing to be the good guy, without needing to be the best friend, without needing to feel everything the other person feels. He reads my essays and holds me accountable when I’d rather write excuses for my behavior. He trusts that there is more to me than my failures, even when I still don’t have all the words to prove him right. He believes when I say I am trying, even after all the mistakes I’ve made, because he sees what’s inside me, even when I can�
�t. I think he sees you.
“I know, I talk too loud,” he says later, after he laughs through our show, and I whisper back to him that he is making up for my bass-less voice. That we make up for each other. He always cleans the bathroom because he knows I hate it, and I (almost) always do the dishes. We don’t have to keep hashing it out. We just have to provide for what needs to be done, within the healthy boundaries we agree to, and commit to always getting better. He laughs loudly again and I am commanded to listen. I am still afraid to, but this time I do.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LOGGING OUT OF PASSPORT TWITTER
In 2017, Timothy and I went on our first out-of-state trip together to Puerto Rico. The country had just been thrust into the mayhem of Donald Trump’s first term, and I had absorbed, without adequate critique, countless images proliferated by travel companies and bloggers promoting vacationing as self-care. At the time, I had bought what these vested interests were selling about the accessible foreignness of the island, and so the off-the-mainland colony seemed like the perfect reprieve from the politics of this anti-Black place.
It was early spring. As soon as I stepped off the plane, the tropical air seeped straight through the many layers I’d thrown on to keep the briskness of New York at bay before departing. Without waiting to reach the road, I peeled my sweaters away, racing to beat the perspiration uncorking underneath.
Already, I was enthusiastically bringing to life the exotic vision of this colony that the state had presented me with. But still I found myself acting surprised when the colonialist ideas around exotic lands I’d consumed sprang to life, too.
Outside the airport, taxi drivers competed with each other to wave us down in Spanish. We understood only enough to realize that the price they quoted was higher than what the Uber app displayed, so we retreated to the option that returned us to the language we knew: the language of on-demand, careless comfort—even when we were 1,600 miles away from home. A language that many people cling to for assurances of safety around the products and services they buy, however precarious that safety is. The language used to promote the gig economy, a system that helps employers avoid fundamental guarantees to workers like minimum wage, overtime, social security, and the right to sue for discrimination by treating them as contractors, with a particularly devastating effect on this island’s workforce. It’s not that ordering an Uber makes you a fundamentally bad person, but like many of the things we do for ease and comfort without considering larger implications, it isn’t fundamentally harmless either. Still, it’s undeniable that this new economy helps Black people enjoy services we might otherwise struggle to access, and as the travel blogs testify, what is vacation without enjoyment?
The Uber app pinged to alert us that Raul would be at the airport in ten minutes, and we waited in sweaty anticipation for this familiar way toward what we hoped to be new experiences, ignoring the paradox of it all. As soon as we piled into his car, we explained to Raul that we were new to the area, although this probably wasn’t news to him. He must have seen many others like us before, who came to use his home as an escape from their lives.
As he drove us toward our hotel in San Juan, Raul pointed out in English all the places we should visit and, closer to our destination, the ones we should avoid.
“Down there is La Perla,” he said, motioning toward a vibrant village at the bottom of a steep hill near the center of the city. Historically, La Perla had been a site for slaughterhouses and the homes of former slaves, which were legally prohibited from occupying the main community center, and today it is known as a hub of the local music industry. From what I could tell, most of the inhabitants were still Black, in stark juxtaposition to the whiter and wealthier tourists swarming the boundary of the city’s downtown at the top of the hill. We wouldn’t see until later the numerous Black and Indigenous people pushed into the background, those who still provide most of the labor to keep the center running for everyone else’s entertainment.
“Don’t go to La Perla,” Raul explained.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Danger,” he said. “Lots of drugs, gangs. You seem like good people. Good people don’t go to La Perla.”
I bristled at the implications, but I didn’t believe I had adequate words to express why I was bothered by Raul’s comment across our language barrier, so I didn’t say anything. Timothy rolled his eyes at me and I rolled mine back, even as I bought into what I perceived to be Raul’s warped worldview by embodying these same “good” people in so many other ways during our trip. People who cast aside the realities of Black folks with less proximity to power in a capitalistic pursuit of comfort.
At the time, Puerto Rico was in the midst of an economic disaster that already had helped propel eighty-seven thousand people to desert the island, even before Hurricane Maria’s devastation. That number itself was just a small fraction of an ongoing exodus of economic refugees who’d been fleeing since the beginning of Operation Bootstrap, a series of government projects that began midcentury, designed to transform the local agricultural economy into a more industrial one.
As Bootstrap forced the labor market to shift from agriculture to tourism, it increased overall wages and, perhaps more importantly to its designers, company profits. It also spurred massive unemployment for the former agricultural workers. Now, the government claimed to need good tourists more than ever to restimulate its economy, as if tourism weren’t part of the problem in the first place.
I hadn’t gone to Puerto Rico under the impression that my presence alone would benefit anyone but tourism companies, but I hadn’t any deeper understanding of the other effects of my presence either. I had heard about the island’s financial crisis before we came, but in my self-centered desire for escape, I hadn’t looked into it as much as I easily could and should have to know its scale and implications and, more importantly, the scale and implications of how I might show up in the midst of it.
I was shocked to witness the extent of the economic ruin, which had been exacerbated by calamitous austerity measures ushered in by an unelected board put in charge of fiscal policy by the President Obama–backed Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act. Schools were shuttered across the city. All kinds of businesses were struggling. And “good” people were spending their money anywhere but down in La Perla.
In Raul’s defense, suggesting that tourists like me avoid places like La Perla may have been for the best, considering the ignorance and police presence that follow and protect moneyed travelers at the expense of local communities. But feeding money to corporations and governments that discard and exploit vulnerable people has never fixed any problem that needs fixing. Colonialism and capitalism exploiting the masses for the benefit of a few “good” people were the things that led to the island’s financial crisis, and tourism is central to this exploitation.
It’s not enough to know that tourism isn’t inherently helpful to local communities, although it does take some work to reject prevailing propaganda. I also had a responsibility to know how my presence might have been harmful. I owe any belated understanding of this to Puerto Rican friends who challenged me on how this responsibility was upheld or abdicated, friends who ask me to consider that this responsibility requires a deeper connection to and embrace of a land’s context than seeing travel as an “escape” allows. Anti-Blackness is global, and there is no avoidance of it. There is only pretending that someone else’s experience of it is not your concern.
In my desperate bid for escape, I spent much of the four days we were in town trying to avoid engaging with the obvious strains on the island’s communities. Just as Raul had warned we might, we found drugs when we journeyed to La Perla, which we’d done specifically to secure the weed necessary to assist in my substance-sustained avoidance of reality.
It was easy to find someone who spoke English and told us where to go, and I wasn’t afraid to ask. I told myself that my willingness to interact with the townspeople of La Perla in th
is way, and this one person’s welcome of me, was a challenge to Raul’s insistence that they weren’t “good” people, and that this challenge was something to be proud of. But I had seen self-righteous saviors of impoverished communities before. I knew that going to poor Black neighborhoods just to make oneself feel like their hero was just as inadequate as any other exploitative touristy thing I could do while more and more people were forced out of their homes. Trying to prove Raul wrong by buying weed was just as useless as trying to be his version of a “good” tourist. Even when I have properly located a problem, carceral logics make it easy to adopt the wrong solutions.
I spent the entire trip using inadequate words, having inherited a different colonizer’s tongue from the one many people there could understand. The violence of English is somehow more blatant when it’s carelessly lobbed like boulders at people who don’t speak it back. At people struggling directly due to the actions of people who speak like me. I had taken Spanish for four years in high school, and at one point I was conversant in it. Now it was just another thing that I had lost and couldn’t quite reclaim.
I was seeking out the foreignness of Taíno land stolen by the US government and all the while calling the island what its thieves had called it. I’d meant the trip to be an escape, but having relationships with people by whom I am held accountable reminds me that escape has never made Black people any freer. Escape, like any type of avoidance, offers us a brief facade of access to power, but it ultimately benefits only capitalism and colonizers. Borikén is a place, not an escape, and to treat it as such is to exoticize its people, commodifying them as tools of my leisure.
Among the “good” tourist dollars I spent, on our last night on the island, Tim and I went zip-lining in the Yunque rain forest, a fifty-minute Uber ride from San Juan. Along the way, our new driver explained how the forest was under constant threat by developers and the government looking for quick ways to rake in money. Despite these threats, the clouds above still pour all day.