For Love or a Manuscript By: Nicole Lockhart
A self-love story about pursuing your bliss and taking the risk to choose your happiness at any price. “Are you alright?” he asks me. I smile. My lover always knows when I’m sick or in a fowl mood. He even gets crampy once a month. The truth is I was fine moments before I texted him that Toni Morisson, literary Nobel laureate, had died. In middle school, I was a terrible math student who would sneak out of class and down to the library to read. In the section marked M, I find Morrison. As I combed the thick language of The Bluest Eye or Beloved, between the pages and paragraphs, she gathered the pieces of little black me and gave them back to me in all the right order. I came to Paris to finish my manuscript. It was time to put to rest the five year endeavor to write a memoir. The job I resigned from two months prior served as more of a hindrance than a mentorship. There proved too little time in the day and too little gas in the tank to write even a mile of my memoir. Quitting is my way of giving myself permission to possess the dream, for one cannot carry the weight of ambition with hands perpetually full. But I can’t sleep that night; a combination of anticipation and anguish, the likes of which keeps many a sojourner staring at the ceilings. Tomorrow I would arrive in Seville, meet my lover in a storybook alley after a month a part. The unfinished novel presses against my backpack as our lips meet in a precious embrace at last. My foggyeyed journalist looks at me as if awaking from a sueño, capturing the reunion with the same skill as his lens in fieldwork. “I’d almost forgotten how to kiss,” he says. I, ever the writer, could never lose the sensation and found ways over the month-long holiday to remind him how to trigger those blessed “tacqui cardias.” “People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception,” says Baldwin’s David in Giovanni’s musty room. And yet the reality of my arrival to this day is that I can neither cover nor retract the 36
