Chapter 7 #2
I stood there longer than I meant to, looking at a place that had held something undeniable and had still been asked to become something else, and I thought about the wall in my apartment holding her records, about the way I had spent the last two years cataloging, preserving, and handling everything like it might lose its value if I used it wrong.
I had been calling it respect. Standing there, it felt closer to hesitation.
The thought settled in quietly, not as a realization I needed to examine right away, but as something that had already decided where it belonged. I left the corner and headed home before I could talk myself out of following it.
By the time I got inside, the light had softened into evening, the apartment holding that stillness that made everything feel suspended for a moment longer than usual, as if it were waiting to see what I was going to do next.
I set my bag down, slipped off my coat, and went upstairs to the wall without giving myself the chance to choose something safe.
I pulled a record from my own crates, Alex Isley, one I had bought for myself without thinking twice about whether it belonged anywhere but with me.
My mother had never connected to her music in a way that made her keep it close, which meant it had never made it onto the wall and had always stayed separate, something I chose without needing it to fit into anything that came before it.
I held it in my hands for a second, turning it over more slowly than I usually would, registering it not just as something I owned but as something I had chosen without asking for permission, then set it on the turntable and lowered the needle, sitting on the floor and letting the sound move through the room without trying to shape it into anything I could manage.
I had spent a long time telling myself I was preserving something, but sitting there with it playing, it became harder to ignore that I had also been avoiding something.
The buzzer sounded before I could follow that any further, then came again a second later, the quick double press he always did without thinking about it, and I stood and went to the door already knowing who it was.
He was there with a bag from the Ethiopian place on Baltimore Ave and a gift-wrapped box tucked under his arm, a combination that made sense as soon as I saw it and didn’t at all.
“You didn’t have to,” I said, stepping back to let him in.
“It’s your birthday,” he replied, which was not an answer so much as a statement of fact he did not feel the need to elaborate on.
He moved through the house with an ease that came from familiarity rather than assumption, setting the food down, reaching for plates without asking, and opening the drawer with the silverware to get us set up.
On his way back through the room, his hand brushed along the edge of my record wall, not absentmindedly, more like he was checking it without needing to stop. His fingers pressed lightly against one of the shelves, testing the give.
“This one’s starting to bow,” he said, glancing at it for half a second before looking back at me. “I’ll come back and reinforce it before it throws anything off.”
He didn’t wait for a response. Just kept moving, like it had already been handled.
Once we got situated at my coffee table, because we always felt more comfortable in the living room with something on TV to watch while we ate, he handed me the box without ceremony.
I unwrapped it carefully, folding the paper back instead of tearing it, and when I saw what was inside, I had to pause for a second to let it register fully that he had gotten me a pair of New Balance 990v6.
It was the collaboration colorway that had sold out almost immediately in September, the pair I had been tracking since July, and they were not only in my size but clearly untouched. New, not resale.
I looked up at him while still holding the box. “How did you get these?”
“I lucked out on the preorder back in August,” he said, already turning back toward the kitchen as if the answer didn’t require anything further.
“When the collab was announced. You had that thing with Adeyemi that day, and I figured there was a chance you couldn’t take the day off and you’d miss the drop. ”
August. The word settled somewhere it was not supposed to stay.
“You preordered them in August,” I repeated, because I needed a second to place what that meant.
He nodded, returning with a few paper towels.
“I wanted to have them if you needed them.”
Alex Isley moved through the speakers, the sound carrying just enough to sit underneath everything without interrupting it, and I stood there with the box in my hands, aware of something shifting in a way that did not ask for immediate interpretation.
I set the shoes back in place, smoothing the tissue paper without thinking about why.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Happy birthday,” he replied, just as simply.
We ate, the conversation moving the way it always did, returning us back to our vibe of easy and familiar, covering ground that didn’t require either of us to say anything we weren’t ready to say.
Then out of nowhere I watched him in the spaces between those moments, noticing the slight delay before he answered certain questions, the way something in him felt held back without being withdrawn, like he had shifted something internally and hadn’t decided what to do with it yet.
“Kendra good?” I asked eventually, letting the question land as casually as I could manage.
He didn’t answer right away, and the pause was brief enough that it could have gone unnoticed if I hadn’t been paying attention.
“We’re not together anymore,” he said.
He didn’t offer anything else, and I didn’t ask. When he was ready, I hoped we could return back to the kinship where he’d tell me.
I nodded, accepting the information in the same way I would have accepted anything else he chose to share, but it did not settle in the way information usually did. It stayed active, moving through everything else in the room whether I acknowledged it or not.
We finished eating, and he cleaned up without being asked, the quiet efficiency of someone who had done it enough times that it no longer required thought. When he left, he did it the same way he always did, without lingering, without shifting the moment into something it wasn’t already.
The door closed behind him, and the house held the absence in a way that made it noticeable. The record had long ago ended, the needle circling at the center with the soft, repetitive sound marking time without moving it forward.
I went back to the table and opened the box again, the tissue paper still folded the way I had left it, careful and deliberate, the shape of the moment preserved without being disturbed.
August.
He had done this in August. I stood there with that for a moment, then took the shoes out of the box and put them on, feeling them settle into place with an ease that made it clear there had never been a question about whether they would fit.
I walked over to the wall, finding a home for Alex to now stay, and then pulled my mother’s copy of Phyllis Hyman’s Living All Alone. I set it on the turntable and let it play.
I moved to sit on the floor with my back against the couch, the shoes still on my feet, and let the music do what it had always done, which was tell the truth without asking permission.
The system I had been relying on, the careful way I had been organizing things into something manageable, no longer felt as solid as it had before. It felt heavy. Heavier than something practical had any right to be.
I had been calling it discipline, calling it timing, calling it a decision I had made for good reasons, but sitting there, it became harder to ignore what it had actually been doing. It had been keeping everything in place so I would not have to move toward it.
The record played through the room, steady and unbothered by whether I was ready to hear it. I sat there until the side ended, letting the silence that followed stretch just long enough to make itself known.
Then I stood and reached for my phone, my thumb hovering over his name for a second longer than necessary as I considered what it would mean to close the distance I had been maintaining so carefully.
I did not call him, but I did not put the phone away either.