He’s rarely in the country when he calls. I love him, but just enough.

“Look at this,” he says, watching us in the mirror, our skins wet and gleaming. “This is so fucking beautiful.”

Don’t get me wrong. I still want forever, Yshwa. But I’ve learned that you can’t force forever on the wrong people. They belong exactly where they are, giving exactly what they want to. I don’t ask for anything more. I figure I shouldn’t have to. Besides, I think about you all the time and it helps me detach from all of this. It releases me. When you look at life from far away enough, the things we talk, think, and gossip about fade to tiny dots, to nothing. I think, will this all matter in thirty years?

I will see my other lover, the painter, in a few weeks. None of us share continents, which makes things simple. I touch his face like it’s holy. He likes to tell me that I’m free, that I can’t be held in a cage, and I used to deny it. But one day I realized I don’t tell him about the others because something about that really does keep me free. I love him, though, and it feels easy.

When I think of them and the love I hold for them, it unfurls into a greater love. My chest multiplies with it. I even want to hold the faces of my friends and tell them I love them. I don’t feel trapped or anchored, which is really strange, Yshwa. I stop being afraid of relocations and I can move wherever I want because I know that I will be loved constantly across all space. And even if it fades with them, it will bloom again. We are all conduits. It moves through us freely.

Yshwa, I am tired of pain. It’s just easier to focus on love and an existence outside this world. At least that feels like freedom.

Still, you like to send me new lovers, like impulsive presents. Like that one who I thought was going to be cocky and brash. He arrived after I had a difficult week and he turned out to be shy and clumsy, like a boy. He was single-minded in bed, his face serene and focused, his body hammering. Boys fuck like that, fast and hard and desperate. But when we stood on the open train platform, exposed to the sky, he pulled me to his chest. I turned my head away so my lipstick wouldn’t stain his clothes and he kissed my forehead more times than anyone had in the past few years. He talked about tennis all the time, like Ewan used to. When we said good-bye, I was wearing the same dress he’d met me in.

“I’ll miss you,” I texted.

“You made my trip,” he typed back.

Still, I am very lonely. They help me forget this, but sometimes it shows up like a continent shifting onto my chest. I’m so tired of being empty. I turned it inside out and wore it like a glove, smeared it on the walls until my house shouted empty, empty, empty. I didn’t know what to do with it afterward. All I know is that it hurts to be in the spaces between freedom.

“Can I have a hug?” I ask my white T-shirt lover.

“Of course,” he answers, and holds me. “Are you okay?”

I want to tell him that my heartache is acting up again, but instead I smile and lie and lie next to his body, watching an animated movie flicker across the screen. I take a little comfort in the fact that he chose to be lying here with me. It matters, even though I still feel lonely with him there.

He saw the scars on my arms for the first time today.

“We have to talk,” he said.

“I used to cut myself,” I replied. “I stopped.”

“I’m glad you stopped,” he said, but it reminded me of how long all of this has been hurting. The pain is so old, Yshwa. I don’t even have the strength to want anything anymore. I just float and stare at the sky, and when the pain hits, I arch my neck to keep the water from overcoming my face. Months ago, the painter looked at me as we lay in his bed.

“That sadness never really leaves your eyes,” he said.

When I was out in Lagos with a group of friends, I met this Somali boy who told me I inhabit a space between depression and happiness, a sweet spot, a brilliant spot. I stared at him and wondered if it was true. If it was, could that spot be more real than either end of that spectrum? It would be a point of perfect balance, I thought.

“You are the most beautiful woman I have seen in all my life,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

He stared at me, then laughed. “Beauty is beauty,” he said, shaking his head. “It just is.”

I stared back at him. He hadn’t been able to stop drinking all night. He had worked his way through small glasses of tequila, larger glasses of vodka, occasional cups of tap water, and he was now holding a blue glass full of gin. I watched him and then I told him about Ewan. When I mentioned Donyen, his face changed.

“You’re too pretty to be gay,” he said.

Later that night, he asked if we had met in a previous life, and I said nothing. We all went to another club, and there, he took my hand and pulled me out under some purple lights.

“I will miss you,” he said. “I wish we had more time.”

I wasn’t sure what he was running away from, but I wanted to tell him that I was the wrong place to run to. It was impossible for me to love him. He had too much hate inside and he thought I would fall for words, as if you can get me with my own weapon. Try a god, I should have told him, they like when you run to them.

Honestly, Yshwa, I just want to rest. Let me find a place where even if I’m alone, I can sit on my veranda and look at a mango tree and we can just talk. You will be the words in my mouth and the ones that fall from my fingers; you will be the one to whom I direct my longing.