My Apartment Is a Lighthouse At Dawn

I cannot sleep in the dark anymore. I used to inch out of bed for Fajr. At 4:50 AM I would crawl to my bedside and supplicate in darkness, murmuring hope that the day would reveal peace and prosperity. “Not even for one second, Allah. Do not leave me over my own affairs for even one second,” I’d whisper, though it was just me. Me and God. Day after day I’d plead for faith in darkness, my thoughts mimicking the atmosphere as my internal midnight competed with soulful daybreak. Soon after I would pull myself back into bed, immediately grasping again for sleep. My apartment is a lighthouse; if I do not catch the last bit of darkness, sunrise will arrest my senses and leave me tired.

The Qur’an says do not claim to have faith, just say you will submit and ask your heart to be filled with it. At first it was a matter of discipline, these mornings, to see if I could try for faith with the fervor I put towards lesser things. But then it became this sacred time, an exacted silence in the loudest place in the world. The text tells us morning prayer is God’s favorite, when all others sleep the faithful rise to greet Him.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. What do I hope for now? Now, I hope for a peace of mind and silence that stretches over life for all time despite tumultuous circumstance. Now I hope for a chance to retreat to warm weather whenever I choose, and I hope to choose often. Now I hope for a true and genuine love to come and protect me— to love me, someone who I was made to love. Now I hope for a house with lots of stairs and a wide open kitchen with high ceilings and sunlight pouring into every corner. Now I hope for laughter for funny things, really funny things that keep my heart light. Now I hope for vocation and legacy and a chance to tell the truth. Now I hope for long bike rides through villages I’ve never seen or heard of and afternoons at a marketplace with many fruits and fresh vegetables prepared in the presence of friends. I hope for samba and jazz and disco music that plays in the homes of strangers who invite me in— extending nights into forever. I hope for a body that can do more than sustain, but also run/ jump/dance around deeply — moved by a full spirit. I hope for a full, focused spirit that can undo any haunting and tap in at any moment. I hope for naps in car rides after long days with plenty of foot room with a driver who knows how to avoid the bumps and never drives too fast. I hope for no missed flights, no delayed flights. I hope for Brazil and Paris and Barcelona in all their secret alleyways and hidden treasures with a wallet big enough to buy all the souvenirs a person can stuff into a suitcase. I hope for admirers and fans that I can hug on and listen to and know they are loved and heard. I hope for boundless compassion and mercy for others. I hope for empathy and peace of mind in its absence. I hope for good literature and films that demand weeping in their beauty. I hope for good holidays and healthy family for whom things are going well always, or who call when things are not going well. I hope to remember this time, when all I had was faith. I conjure up faith & remember. I trust Him. 
I have found 5:10 is the same across the world— dark azure skies and restless birds. I linger in bed contemplating the day. By 5:40 it is woosh, whoop, beep, shirk once again. I study these sounds, realizing I only hear them because I have learned to listen. The sky burst into cerulean. It is changing. I can only see it because I have learned to see. Eyes low and unanxious, I await the sunrise. I have learned patience. I trust vermillion and turquoise are soon coming to consummate shamelessly on the avenue. They will give way to a capri that will claim everything, and the world will enter right on cue. I know this like I know my name, and yet I’ve had to learn it through observation. It’s taken years for me to notice the gradient architecture of dawn building itself into day; and yet there it was all along. My faith, growing and consuming me like the coming day. I, too, am changing.

But not so fast. At 6:12 the sun is here, and now the day that was once a prayer will undress herself before me. I will have to miss it. This is where I take my exit. I need to rest now. I am still tired, and some human problems do not require holy elixirs. I will save my miracles for the second morning. This time I will take my sleep; it does not take me. I close my eyes and bathe in a tainted sunshine trading faith for fantasy, hope made real. Fajr is done, but I am praying still, “Not for even one second, Allah. Don’t leave me.”

At Your Best: A Case Against The Last Word

All writers are obsessed with endings, and rightfully so. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a Harlem love story and arguably the greatest American novel ever written, is 581 pages. And as beautiful as they all are in prose and figuration, none are as important as the last seven, the epilogue. This epilogue is one of the most controversial in Western literature, as scholars debate why Ellison not only gave readers such a powerful and riveting plot, but insisted upon telling them exactly how to feel about it, leaving nothing to the imagination. Ellison foresaw this controversy and addressed it in the epilogue directly. He states, “Why do I write, torturing myself to put it all down? Because in spite of myself I’ve learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled ‘file and forget’ and I can neither file nor forget.” Ellison needs us to know Invisible Man is a love story. Despite its political overtones, racial treatise, and several allusions to Russian crime literature, it is a love story. I have read Invisible Man six times, perhaps because no work has taught me more about writing. But I’ve read the epilogue more times than I could possibly count, because no work has taught me more about endings.

In my own Harlem love story, I once loved a young man. However, who and why is not important. It’s not important that we met at a park that separated our houses by three blocks and two avenues. It is not important that we met in the spring of one year and parted the summer of the next. It is negligible that he was the only person on Earth who referred to me by my middle name. It is mere coincidence that our mothers’ names rhymed and insignificant that both our maternal grandfathers were named Charles. These things are important to me, but they won’t help you get along. Despite all 378 days of our story, the only needful details are found in the last.

I breathe into the receiver — “Do you love me?” I ask. After a long spell of silence he responds, “Yes. It’s been hard for me to say, but I do love you.” I linger on the sentiment for only a moment before countering. “But can you live without me?” I say. He pauses, “Yes.” I hang up.

Over the next six months we would replay this act four more times. We would separate for short albeit agonizing periods until one of our memory’s conjured up the sweetness of the other, calling us back to the same dead end masked as a crossroad. Like a priest I would coerce from him a sacrament confession, insisting that he admit the truth of his incapability of loving me. Tears would come streaming down my face, my heart resigned to loss. I would scream and cry. “You liar! How could you lead me on like this? Do you know what you’ve done to me?” Though we re-enacted this scene once per season, I knew it was finally over the last time, because I said something that, for me, was truly out of character — nothing at all.

Though many romantic films & novels exalt the final say, I’ve come to find that in real life it is always the least fruitful moment. If love is truly over, there is nothing left up for discussion. While in love, words sustain hope as promises are propped up on words. The Bible tells us, “Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word.”
Faith in love differs not at all. Similarly, most harm committed while in love is done via the words we say, as our interior resentments are made real through language. Therefore, when it has all been worked out, the memories worked over, and the heart overworked — what better way to say, “We have failed. The possibility of us is no more,” than to give up the final word?

When love is truly tested it never comes down to the tit-for-tat bickering over daily grievances. Instead love is measured by a fast draw, a race to either salvage or destroy the dignity of your counterpart at all costs. If flawed human love is measured by how much we can take then Godlike love must be measured by all we learn to give. For me, giving up the final word was about locating the deepest wound, choosing the perfect weapon, feeling completely justified in my desire for vengeance, knowing exactly when to strike, and still choosing not to. Love concedes the advantage for the greater good every. single. time. We do this not to maintain our lover’s faith in us, but to keep their faith in love. I have spent my entire life watching love’s tenderness descend into vitriol: marriages that once promised forever unwilling to concede even forgiveness when it was all said and done. Though the lovers survived and even learned to desire again, I knew each time the words they said taxed a bit of their faith in love itself. Perhaps in other moral fables it does not matter much, but in love stories being righteous is always much more important than being right.

Still, I am not one to simply aggrandize the good of suffering. Martyrdom for the cause of romantic love has got to be the least righteous kind of martyrdom there is. Truth be told, I‘ve also given up the last word in exchange for a lasting sense of relief. When we insist upon the last word we impose a kind of artificial closure that leaves us with the labor of wondering perpetually what we could have done differently.

I distinctly remember leaving a two-year relationship on the roof of my newly minted apartment. “You have let me down too many times. You’re just not the man I need you to be.” Those were the last words I uttered as I shut the door behind me, leaving his things to be collected in the gangway of a house he’d never enter, a home we’d never build. Though I felt dignified in that moment, later I came to live with the consequences of those words. It was me who would come to wonder what condition I’d left him in and what I’d made of him for the next woman. It was me who would have to investigate each memory in the death of this love, piecing together what went wrong. It was me who would have to replace him with the perfect man that lived in my head in order to justify the cruelty I’d done. It was me who would agonize over my so-called let down, and me who would deal in an unrelenting confusion that would not let up.

The one who carries the last word is left to bear the memories of all the words traversed over time. When you give the last word you push the entirety of love — its tenderness and tenacity, its ecstasy and energy — into the defeat of language. I have learned to hold on to silence not out of resignation, but to keep love real. Love after all is an action, not an act. Thelonius Monk once said there has never been music, only “musicking” — energy created in time. The only way to end a great song is to let it give way to silence and trust the beat goes on. Our analysis of heartbreak will always be as inadequate and incompetent as we are. Ordinary people, mess that we are, still grasping at the possibility of unconditional, capital “L” LOVE, God embodied. As an author I understand our obsession with endings, because in them we find our final acts of authority. We say, “Make no mistake, this is a love story.” But love has never been that simple, its ending never so conclusive, and as a lover I’ve come to wholly distrust my ability to discern.

When you give the last word you push the entirety of love — its tenderness and tenacity, its ecstasy and energy — into the defeat of language.

Why should I bring forth the death of love? What good would it do to trade the memories of great romance — sweetness of skin, hands tethered even while sleeping, the man who was all at once my bridge and troubled water, shoulders strong and yet still too young to rely on — my friend — for the incompleteness of the last word? To quote Ralph Ellison, “Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?” Of all the things I have lost to pride in my young life, nothing was less worthy a sacrifice than all I traded for the final say.

Like love, in silence I am forced to grow up and admit finding blame brings no absolution. Like love, in silence I find a miracle in creating remission where there is no repentance. It is here, in the finality of love, I trade the burden of accounting for the uncertainties of life for the pleasure of just having lived it. If faith comes by hearing, then surely the death of faith lies in speaking. As Ellison posits, “Why should I be the one to dream this nightmare?” in his final words he answers, “Because though implicated and partially responsible I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain. Yet in spite of all I find that I love.”

In lieu of the last word, I find that I love. Though short of the glory of forever, I have loved. Mess that I am, I have loved. And perhaps with the knowledge of my quiet strength I trade the pain of having lost for the greatest possibility of action — the courage to love again.