I met Pearl, on that evening, at that place. I don’t remember the track. But I could place the genre. In her eyes, on her lips, her emerald, green watch, again, perfect. As her lips tottered; “what music is that? I never find it in the Jazz or even in soul.” I answered in the confidence that I always had asked the same question. “Oh yeah it’s the blues.” For me , the blues had always transported me.
With the blues, I went anywhere and everywhere. In my soul, in my spirit, to Manhattan, in Denver, back to Kampala, to Kisumu, and then to Paris. The blues captured the things that language couldn’t. And in this moment, they captured Pearl, this lover. “How come you love easily?” I asked.
She longed for her person, the one with whom they would do things together, the one that came hard with love just as she did. As for me, I longed for the same thing, but I cared less for the arrival of that bus. I had just finished my mass; I had found love in the Eucharist. But maybe, I was in my distraction.
Is there a world where the love we read in the books could be found?
Last year, I had wasted time sending out the conversation of Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin. I sent it out not that people would watch it and listen. But just so they could know the thing I longed to recreate. I longed for an intellectual lover, the one with whom to argue, about all things, even definitions. Like what is love? What defines it? What’s this sweet pain? To love is to pain, to not love is to pain, one had no way out.
I think I understood Pearl, but I would never feel what she felt. No matter how much we understood people, there are things that would still be closed to us. The things language couldn’t capture. I longed to understand and learn the language of feeling. For without it,
everyone was still a stranger. Perhaps what we longed for in love is a home, knowing that for the first time in our lives, somebody felt just as we felt. Yes, we longed for a shared feeling!