Named After the Animal
Illustration by Kat Morgan “There’s a name for the animal / love makes of us—named, I think, / like rain, for the sound it makes.”
–Nicole Sealey, “Object Permanence”
I planned on moving these boxes into my new apartment in Alabama with my beloved, but when I drove to DC to pick my beloved up they were stiff as I hugged them hello. When we went for walks to the grocery store or their favorite spot for jollof rice or the MetroPCS store that played go-go music all day and night, my beloved looked past me. They sat at a distance, they slouched in their chair, they walked paces ahead of me. They made their body a deer in the front yard—a good thing that I know I cannot touch. When it was time to go back down south, my beloved did not get in the car. They told me to drive safely. I hear that my beloved is thriving. I hear they are planting a garden or maybe they finally went to Paris, but they are lost to me and I am lost in the ticking of the days, lost in my own skin, and lost in the state of Alabama without my beloved who smelled of vetiver and came to me in every dream for months.
Carrying boxes alone, I learn quickly that summer is the body’s season in the South, where the air becomes so heavy and wet it is impossible not to feel as if you are moving through a massive respirating organism every time you step outside. In this massive body, I am a wild germ, a restless impulse. I feel myself becoming something with less weight, that speaks less, that lays lighter on the earth. I stop sleeping. I eat only when it occurs to me that it has been far too long since I ate last. I feel a cavern open up inside of me, and suddenly there is so much air. When I tell my mother about it on the phone, she says she’s very concerned. I can’t make her understand that she doesn’t need to worry. I am not leaving the light of this world; the light of this world has left me, and here in the strange benthic expanse of a broken heart and an empty apartment in a new city, I will become a different creature. I will become a creature shaped by the heat of the Deep South and the demands of the wilderness that is losing a first great love. I will grow a new life for myself, inside of myself, cobbled together from memory, obsession, confession, and a starving need to know the name of the thing that I’ve become.
I spent my girlhood barefoot, running up hillsides covered in thistles and sharp stones. I knew the land in every bit of my body; I knew the land without language for it. I didn’t have to learn that the branches I sat in belonged to a valley oak. These trees