Intimacy: A Short Story

There goes that feeling again.

You know, the one that just eats you up after a long day of what manifests in your eyes as bullsh*t.

“I think it’s frustration,” I say to myself, as I make sense of what I’m feeling.

“No, it’s anger,” I say to myself, again.

“Nah, it’s both.”

“I’m actually mad as hell.”

I had just wrapped the longest workday of my life, and I was all but relieved.

I look up at the clock on my wall to check the time.

“5 hours,” I say aloud, getting up from my kitchen table to leave my make-shift office. “It’s been 5 damn hours and I’m still fired up.”

I was the VP of Sales at the largest media firm in the U.S and these motherfuckers had me bent.

“They must not know who I am,” I say, under my breath, feeling big bad as I poured myself a glass of Beaujolais.

“Stop playing with her!” I yell, again to myself, grabbing my then full glass of wine and walking a few baby steps over into my living room. I was talking my shit.

You would think that some things would be understood. Especially after all these years of getting it out of the mud and working twice as hard as my non-Black peers to get where I was.

You would think that after all the stats of Black women being overworked and underpaid I would never be in a position to carry someone else’s load.

“Hmph, won’t be me.”

The thing was, even as a VP, the decision was out of my control. Whether I believed it was bullshit or not, the most I could do was object to it and hope that my superiors would see it the way I do. Otherwise, it would be me.

And I would be it.

Talk about powerless…I felt defeated, and I needed to release some of this tension. So, I called my ex.

“Hey, what you doing?” I say to him.

“Nothing just about to leave work,” he replied.

He was the Senior Product Developer at a tech start-up just up the block from my Manhattan studio. We had been broken up for a few years now, but we were still casually involved.

“Can you stop by? I’m having a day and I really need support.”

He laughs, “Yo, you be goin’ through it.”

I halfway laugh, acknowledging the joke and still recognizing it as my truth.

“Shut up boy.”

We laugh in unison until we pause.

“So, you coming?” I ask, waiting for a straight answer.

“Yeah, I’ll be there.”

I breathe a sigh of relief.

“Aight,” I tell him. “See you soon.”

I hang up my phone and turn to BET, hoping to catch my show, Being Mary Jane. I sip my red, getting into the drama of what eerily mimics my own, and catch more than a few laughs along the way. I love this show.

“BUZZZZZZZ,” my doorbell rang.

I got up to let him into my building, then hang tight for him to knock on my door before letting him in.

He comes in cheesing with arms wide-opened for me to welcome his embrace.

I roll my eyes and smirk. Damn, I love-hate this nigga.

We hug.

“Hey, baby girl,” he says to me, as if I’m his empress. “You, alright?”

Tall, dark, and still handsome, and damn sure was. Now, I was, anyway.

We head to my living room together, and not a second later I let loose…with tears.

“It’s so HARD being a Black woman,” I say in between my ugly cry and my snotty nose.

I went on and on about how unappreciated I was; how tiring it was to have to go through my days feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders and how often I suppress my feelings just so I can make it through this life.

He didn’t say a word.

As I released my hurt, he just held me close rubbed my back in consolation.

Until that moment, I couldn’t really identify the thing that I was missing; that was until he gave it to me.

Intimacy.