BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 38

WEDNESDAY
19.11.1996
DORIAN

               I scratch out a few notes from my score paper and replace them before I play through the line again. Luckily, the music room is unoccupied during common lunch hours and I get to use the wall piano instead of the electric keyboard with headphones. Music always sounds better when it's allowed to fill up the room.

Considering I had no instruments with me, I managed to get a surprising amount of composing done while in Halsett (it's not surprising at all, I was with you). That said, the drafts have several kinks to smooth out. It doesn't take long for me to lose myself in the music and for my hands to do the work while my mind drifts along equally winding paths.

I like to wonder when it was that I fell in love with Isaiah.

It's an oddly calming exercise that lets me sit back and rewind my life as a movie, notice every tiny detail from the lighting to the way he angles his fingers or I incline my head, and, at the pivotal scene, exclaim: This is it! This is the moment that changed everything.

Maybe it was only weeks before our first kiss when I found him reading T.S. Eliot and pointed out that the poet was antisemitic. Isaiah had laughed. 'The brudda's dead. What am I s'posed to do about it?' To which I gave a dull, 'You could not read his poetry.'

He went silent for a minute before he shut the collection. 'That's fair.' And I never saw him pick it up again.

Maybe it was months before that when he discovered Louise Bennett Coverly's poetry written in Patois and the sheer joy of something beautiful written in a language considered primitive brought him to tears. He read them to me, translating each line to standard English so I could understand, not once criticising me for not knowing my own mother's tongue.

Maybe it was the August after our GCSEs. I had summer school in Cairo and we didn't talk for two months. The day we had arranged to meet again, he was waiting for me at the bridge that would lead to Lower Halsett, leaning against the rusted balustrade. I don't know whether it was he who had changed or me, but something was different.

He was dressed in his faded sleeveless Whitney Houston t-shirt and the sun soaked on his biceps. He'd come from his shift at the garage and something about the grease that stained his hands and forearms made my mouth water. And when he greeted me with his wah gwaan and fist bump, there was a glint in his eye that said he knew I was confused and he liked being the cause of it.

When we had walked along the river for ten minutes, I turned to him, squinting because of the sun that haloed him. 'Aren't you going to ask what Egypt was like?'

'I'm pretty sure them those libraries in Egypt are the same as libraries in Suffolk. Assuming they've got shelves with books on em.' He grinned to display his tooth gap though there was a gentle edge to it that meant: I read all your postcards, I know what it was like. 'If I ask, will you have sum interesting to say?'

I wanted to argue that I'd done other things than sit at the library. I wanted to argue that the rich engraved walnut our host school built bookshelves from was different from the pine we had at Coeus. But he was right.

I hated how effortlessly he stripped me naked, yet loved it twice as much. How should you react to tender mockery if not fall in love?

At least, it was an hour later, once we had settled to our usual enclave at the river's bend where we were accompanied only by water and the yellow blossoms of common gorse and therefore safe to smoke our first spliff which we had planned since we were twelve ('we'll try it together'), that I felt that terrifying hook somewhere between my belly button and groin for the first time.