A History of Ghosts, by Faylita Hicks
It was an oddly warm night in November when Ray decided to jump from my third-floor balcony and into the mostly abandoned parking lot below. A few hours before, we had made love the tired way—with us both on our sides, my leg lifted-up just enough to give him soft access—until we moaned ourselves to sleep. Had I known what was about to happen, I would have made him get dressed and follow me to Vegas. We could’ve eloped. Or just gone down to one of the bars over on the Square for another round of vodka tonics and some messing around in the back by the pool table. We could have spent the whole night out by the San Marcos River, tossing rocks and smoking menthols; skinny dipping until the cold set in and chased us home.
But I didn’t know what was coming and instead woke up to his body ticking next to mine—his mouth like a clock of skin groaning into my ear.
Climbing up over his twitching body, I rushed to turn on the bathroom light and witness his seizure in real time. Watching him swim back and forth between the sheets, his neck strained and back curled in, I suddenly saw my years laid out before me. I knew, in that moment, that I would, if I had to, spend the rest of my life trying to put this man back together. It was a mad thought, and I was pissed immediately after it happened.
Before this night, all suicidal thoughts had seemed threat-less somehow, an attempt to make me hold onto him harder because—I assumed—it seemed to him as though I was always letting him go. In the years before, I was constantly out trying to make a name for myself by touring with a couple of poets over in Louisiana. I was busy most days, something he hadn’t expected when he had asked me to be his wife. I was either writing or performing or practicing or rubbing myself into him but rarely were we making love. I mean, rarely were we talking about all the things we needed to be doing to make a life together—the measurable manifestations of love—as we knew them. Searching for the jobs or the homes or the places where we could be married. I knew that I loved him, but I was rarely making way for that love in our day-to-day.
All of that and I still wasn’t afraid that he’d leave me—until he started toward the door. His body racked by the residual electricity of the seizure, he stumbled toward the balcony we had made out on the week before. My body moved before I told it to, and I threw my arms around his chest, pulling him back from the door. The balcony. The parking lot I knew he wanted to lay in. He grunted, trying to push past me but I wrestled him to the ground and threw my whole self on top of the man, grateful that the seizure had finally made him weak.
He had explained the pain to me before. How the encephalitis had seemed to clip into his memories faster and faster each time. He had explained his wish to die. But I had not listened until that moment, when I could see our characters—embracing now—in the wide-angle reflection of the T.V.’s black screen, my own reflection breathing hard and hovering over his naked body, listening to him cry. In the screen, we glowed, our figures heavy with streetlights and foggy with alternate endings as he begged away our vows.
“Please. Just let me die.”
+
Months before I met Ray, I learned how truly dangerous it was to love a Black man. My daddy had been trying to tell me this my whole life, but until I read the headlines, I had not acknowledged the possibility. It’s that way sometimes, before your parents stop shielding you. What I thought I knew was dulled by the prayer meetings and the well wishes of the white church folk who made up my tiny nondenominational world in Austin, TX. For that naïve version of me, black men died in the history books and on the TV, in other countries and in other neighborhoods—not in mine. Not on my front porch. Not in my lifetime. That all changed quickly in 2006, when the news that Sean Bell had been killed the day before his wedding hit my Facebook page. It was the first time it had occurred to me that I might not be safe—no matter where I lived.
Sometimes, after a long day of serving half-smiles at the International House of Pancakes to San Marcos’ bored locals—I close my eyes and see Sean’s smooth face. While taking off my slip proof shoes and sauce-stained apron—I hear the club music and see the sweat shine of the girls swiveling their hips in his direction as he shares another drink with his boys. In the low light of the single bulb humming above my bathroom sink—I can see his last smile sliding off his face and into the lot at the sight of quick-silver in the hands of a stranger. Under the hot water spit down from my tiny shower head—I can hear each of the shots punching through the Nissan Altima’s thin armor; a cloud of metal punctuated by the question of civility. Quiet and alone in my house—I can hear his fiancé screaming through the phone as someone tells her what has happened.
And I know what happens next.
In those first few days, all anyone could post about were the policemen—but I wondered about the almost-wife, the woman with her wedding dress hanging from the bedroom door, a glass of wine sitting on her coffee table. I wondered if she and I were the same age. I wondered if I had ever actually made it to New York, if she and I would’ve been homegirls, listening to Neo Soul and writing poems. I wondered if I knew her. I wondered what I would do if something like that ever happened to me.
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Months after Sean Bell, I was back to living like I had forever and was helping my service sorority host a gospel event on our campus when Ray fell into the corridor alongside his frat brothers. They were there to help volunteer—so I put him to work. Watched unashamedly as he strutted tall across the lobby, carrying boxes of grape juice and plastic silverware, making everyone around him laugh at some inside joke. I had to know who he was and since neither of us were particularly religious, we stood in the halls and flirted—him expertly. He answered all of my questions, staring into my eyes and smirking. Joked about the Insane Clown Posse & Eminem. Offered to carry my box of utensils back to the supply closet. Me? I tried to seem smart and chill but still managed to almost fall down a whole staircase while I was walking backwards and checking him out. We exchanged numbers that night, later telling everyone our official anniversary was the day we met. At the end of 2007, six months into dating, he cooked me a sadly dry steak, mash potatoes with bell peppers, and some mac and cheese. We sat out on the balcony, fighting the Texas wind, watching the sun be swallowed by the horizon, and attempting to write poems. That night, while making love, he asked me to marry him—and I said yes.
+
Ray never wanted to meet the couple I had been dating/fucking for about a year. He had found the CD of photos from my last sex party—the ones with me riding other men and crawling between the legs of other women—and broken it on his knee.
“You’re mine,” he asserted. “I am yours,” I explained.
But I was only his because I was finally ready to share myself again. I had chosen him— out of all the others—to be my home. The place I came back to faithfully. Back then, I still didn’t have the words to explain that I had finally found a way to have my body be my own. How could I describe the freedom I felt walking through a crowded room with my curves hot and ready to be worshipped? Honored? How could I express what a privilege it was just to be alive and allowed to carry joy and pride throughout my whole body? Would he ever understand just how long it took for me to get here, to us? How many times I almost died along the way?
+
At the end of our first year together, I learned why he had proposed so quickly. He didn’t think he would live long. It explained why he was the first one to attempt some daring jump or drank a whole bottle of Ever Clear at the New Year’s Eve party. His frat brothers and friends kind-of understood that something was wrong—but I knew that it was the random seizures, the constant headaches associated with his encephalitis and the doctor’s life expectancy prediction that made him live like he was dying. I knew that it was this that made him love me—like he was dying. That made him ask me to have a baby two years into the relationship, even though I kept pushing the wedding date. And how was I supposed to tell this beautiful, dying man—who chose me to spend the rest of his days with—that I didn’t want to have his baby?
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In 2005, a year before Sean Bell’s name hit the headlines of the New York Times and I met the man I would fall for, I was working in Austin, living in an apartment complex that was tipped out on drug dealers, single mamas, college drop-outs, and everyone in between. The elevator always smelt like piss and the apartment’s manager regularly “lost” renter’s checks, but I didn’t have to sign anything, and I could at least save some money sleeping on my homeboy’s couch. The first time I smoked weed in that apartment was also the first time I tried coke, was also the same day I got my face smashed into a coffee table. I remember coming down off the high, days later, underneath a highway that was several blocks from the complex. Whatever I didn’t remember about what had happened was recounted to me later by some of the women who lived in the building and the guy who had initially invited the drug dealer into our apartment that day. I left soon after, hearing later that almost all of the men who had been involved in what happened to me had been picked up during a drug bust in the complex. I counted myself lucky and did whatever I could to pretend like it had never happened.
I didn’t know how to tell the man I loved that I was just getting back to appreciating what all it was I carried with me. I was learning how to laugh again. And how to relax my shoulders. I was learning how to not cringe when someone ran their hands across my thigh or not hold back my orgasm quietly. I was still trying to get out the cage that had kept me from embracing my body and sexuality fully. I was healing. And to marry him would be like no longer having myself to myself—and I needed me. I needed to love all of me. The couple, the parties—they were all just celebrations of my newfound whole self and here he was, trying to tie me down again. I loved him—but I resented him.
He crossed the room and kissed me, pushing my body up against the bathroom door—a permission I had finally felt comfortable giving him—and leaned in.
“I don’t want to share,” he whispered into my mouth, begging with what I now know was his own last selfish request. The request of a man who knew then what I didn’t—
“Fine.” I conceded. “You don’t have to.”
+
I am still thinking of this—the last time we made love—at his funeral a little over a month later in 2010. We had been arguing again, over the same issues: my need for more sex, his need for my presence, our need to set a date and just be married already. We had broken up again—the way we did every three months—with a week of cursing each other out before a long night of apologies and whiskey and badly written poetry. The doctors say that he spent about three days on his bathroom floor after having another seizure the morning after our last fight in a Taco Bell parking lot.
Listening to my friend Shae explain what had happened over the phone, I felt the rehearsed cold in my body. I knew the empty would come and the rage, but I was not prepared for the silence. After all these years, it had happened to me. My Black man had died, and I had become an almost-wife.
I was grateful for the air-conditioned pews of the church but disturbed by the clear blue skies greeting us just outside the church doors. I didn’t want to move. It was too sunny out there. Too beautiful at the burial site. Too many birds singing in the trees. Too many bright wreaths laid on his gravestone. There too many teeth in the crowd. I sat wondering, for hours, how they fit the whole of him into the small urn sitting on the podium before me: Where were his hands? Where was the man I loved now?
+
I don’t know which one of us is to blame. Sometimes I blame the Texas heat for not returning to check on him. Too hot to be out here yelling. Sometimes I blame his roommates for not noticing how long it had been since he’d left the house. How do you not wonder if everything is okay? Most days, I just blame myself for being selfish. For wanting to know myself intimately. Wholly. For being so focused on my own personal mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual growth that I was willing to put myself first—in almost everything. Sometimes I blame him—for knowing how close to death he was and letting me screw it up anyways.
Or maybe we’re both to blame, stepping into a love we knew couldn’t possibly last, and still hoping that it would anyways. I think maybe that’s what’s wrong with so many relationships these days—we’re all constantly making ourselves smaller in order to make someone else happy. We’re so afraid of “being alone,” we’re willing to compromise ourselves to death if it means we have someone to share what little time we have left with.
In my mind, the death of Sean Bell and the death of my fiancé Ray, are linked by the braveness of Black love. I call it brave, though I wonder if it is another word. Are we brave simply because we are Black AND we love or are we brave because we know what waits for us, the outliers of society, and we choose to love each other anyways? We choose to pursue our lives and its many possible joys knowing what waits—just around the corner—for too many of us?
What I learned from the greatest love I’ve ever known is that it is kinder to love freely, without the constraints of the traditional monogamous relationship. I won’t be committing to a monogamous relationship until I’ve been able to tear into my passions enough that it won’t be a burden to dedicate time and attention to my future partner’s needs. If I love, for now, it will have to be a brisk thing. I am still selfishly running towards my poetry, my music, my prose. I am still becoming reacquainted with this body, healing from its many traumas. In some ways—I’m still mourning. A decade later.
A ghost of a womxn, I still think it is a right to celebrate the small deaths of my body: the gratifying end of disconnection from others; coming to an epiphany about my own power and resilience as a survivor; to pursue my carnality the way one might choose to pursue any other sort of passion; to enter into the night an ache, and leave the next morning covered in a salve of my own making; to be allowed to fall apart—finally.
Faylita Hicks (she/her/they) is a writer, performer, and directly-impacted organizer working with Mano Amiga, specializing in criminal justice reform in rural communities and the cultural impact of trauma on queer black people. They are the author of the poetry collection, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), and the Managing Editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and were awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and Jack Jones Literary Arts. A finalist for the 2018 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship and Palette Poetry’s 2019 Spotlight Award, they were also awarded grants from the San Marcos Arts Commission in 2017 and 2019, received a residency from the Vermont Studio Center, and were accepted for the Tin House 2020 Winter Workshop in Nonfiction. In December 2019, their incarceration story was featured in PBS’s Independent Lens Documentary Series. Their writing has been published in or is forthcoming in Adroit, The Cincinnati Review, Color Bloq, Cosmonauts Avenue, Foglifter, Glass Poetry Series, Huffington Post, Linden Avenue, Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Slate Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and The Texas Observer among others.