Water: Una amistad como el mar
Perhaps the first feeling we register on our skin is water. Our womb-mate, that which keeps us alive within our first home. Perhaps it is what has made us, put us together. It definitely held us first.
As I walk towards her shore, I sing the praises of Yemanja, my mother, the open sea, my first home. We float, gently, I pray, and rock against the cocoon. I lay on the surface of the sea and close my eyes, starfish, I am carried by soft waves. I can lose myself completely. Breathe in as the tiny waves rock up… breathe out in the stillness. Count ten breaths before opening my eyes. The flow of water is like constant change. Just like me. And you. And us together. Floating on your surface, I feel the waves hold me, and I close my eyes, losing sense of where I am. I surrender. Let love guide me.
Mi amante. Vinculo amoroso is better, they taught me here. How about vinculo amistable? How about vinculo amistable amoroso? Loving friendly connection. How about rafeeq, hameem, saahib? The words roll on my tongue, salty, unclear, in all the languages. They keep telling me to define my connections but how do I name that of which I am made, love itself? Water flows, you cannot contain her.
Let’s try with feelings instead. How about morning coffees in bed, pillow to pillow, soft whispers asking how do we define love? Or late nights, lights out, facing each other, softly sharing hurts we’ve never shared before? How about laying on the beach, under the hot sun, deciding to tan topless for the first time because we feel braver together in this beach full of humans, facing every wave life throws at us? How about walking the city streets, your long fingers curled in mine, my first friend, my forever soulmate? How about exploring the underground world of mushrooms and dreams and god herself, on a quiet afternoon at the park, laying under a tree for hours? Or every shovel of dirt and every grunt of work, sweating, building, planting, growing, tending, side by side? And all the extended voicenotes on the latest books we’re reading and how we will dismantle the world? Or the early morning coffees as we heard the soft waves beside us? Every dance in a dark warehouse and dungeon, face to face, back to back, packed in with strangers, arms around each other, knowing we are safe together? Every march we’ve marched, every drum we beat, every chant in unison? How about every ugly cry holding each other so tight, no explanations, no questions, just the safe arms of a friend I love. Tell me, world, how this is not love.
This is the kind of friend you are:
Without making me realize
my soul's anguish
you slip into my house at night
and, while I am sleeping
you silently carry off
all my suffering
in your beautiful hands.
Hafez
There is a certain kind of friendship, a heart-warming, profound kind of love, which we can find refuge in. Refuge from the white supremacist patriarchal homophobic capitalistic ecologically destructive forces all around. I read the script and tried to follow it for years, raising boys, dating them, loving them, prioritizing them. What a ruse, a systematic waste of life, keeping me from those I can truly raise higher, keeping me from myself. Some think it’s cute, when a white man and a brown woman walk down the street hand in hand. Some think it’s a twisted kind of activism. Some still think it’s repulsive. Whatever way, the distance remains, holding hands or not, they will never live as the other does, he will never feel the weight of the world pushing her down. Let your hand go, I don’t need no saviors like you. Save yourself first, I am well and good. I turn to my brown and black and queer women and gender non-conforming friends for refuge, every time. These are places where I don’t need to explain 80% of the things I spend my time explaining when I am in relationship with those who are not, the others, who can’t handle half the things we need to say.
Friendship, the highest form of love, saves me every day. Every time my heart hurts, the universe, the goddesses, the oceans, present me with the most beautiful inspiring women, and I am grateful. Almost an apology, a tender caress, to soothe and ease the pain of the world.
Explain to me why my friends could ever take second place after socially sanctioned love, what you call romance, how that could ever be true. Obsessed with categories and hierarchies, they’ve relegated friendship to ‘just friends’. What does that even mean? Just friends. We should be so lucky to have friends. The foundations of our lives, the drops of ocean and sun and love which hold the days together, make sense of the world, sustain us when it is all falling apart. They come in waves, bathing me in love.
Friendship feeds us, doesn’t eat away at us. Expands our souls, enhances our capacities, deepens our attention to life, fills our hearts. And yes, sometimes it breaks us too. As can everything and everyone. I’ve grieved and mourned lost friends more than all else, they touch a part of my soul and body and mind which is deeper and more profound than a lover will ever know. And yet, it has brought me higher than high, lights my brain on fire, my heart a burning coal. Has made my laughs deeper, my orgasms better, my grief more profound. When was the last time you felt the pleasure only a friend can provide? No one will care for you the way a loving friend can.
How is it that we are still defining the hierarchy of our relationships by who has access to our wombs? Let the patriarchy die, let me have my body back. Let me define for myself what is in my heart and stop with your ridiculous questions. If sleeping with you puts you above my friends, I’d rather only lay with my friends. My equals, my companions. Dissolve these silly hierarchies, these heteronormative norms you’ve forced upon us.
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Khalil Gibran
The freedom of friendship to go anywhere, to shape shift, to flow where it needs to. For a long time or a short moment, a purity of love. To move, taking cues from the ocean waves, from Yemanja herself. To pray at the altar of the open sea is to seek the highest devotion of love, that of friendship, l’amistad in the flesh, in every drop. The ordinary and very real kind of devotion, as we pray to the goddess we pray to and for each other, we let the salt clean our wounds, we let the waves carry us home. Every friendship a wave, it’s own moment, it’s own lesson. Moment to moment, knowing that all is impermanent, that change is god, and to still revel in the beauty of our friendships. And, when the time is right, to let each other go, with a push forward, safely to rock onto the next wave in life. To watch each other go out into the open sea, to learn and experience the endless horizon, knowing that when we need to, we will find safe harbor in each other’s shores.
The past floats further and further away, the present wave being the only one left, and I ride the high of the purest of loves, of those who I love with intention and who I choose every day. Those who fill my heart beyond the silly romances society has deemed should be highest of all. Loving friends. Vinculos amistables amorosos. May we know them, be them, worship them. May we be the devotees at the sacred altar of love, the highest form of passion. May the altar always be brimming with fire and joy and salt and tobacco. May we take refuge in the lessons of the sea, to flow freely, to embrace and hold each other safely, to play and laugh and love as deeply. May every lighthouse guide us to each other. May every shore be a loving embrace. Yemanja, show us the way. Ase!
[all photos are mine, do not use]