i see you:

sakae

I see you when I close my eyes at night and open them in the morning.

I see you when I cry and when I laugh.

I see you every moment and it hurts.

You have brown eyes.

The most generic eye colour, but on you, beautiful.

Brown eyes and brown hair and brown skin and they called me yellow next to you; they called us weird and gross and a man waving a Confederate flag sneered at you and called you nigger and called me gook.

I wanted to punch him in the face.

But you held me back with a kiss on my lips and a middle finger in his face and I started to cry.

Saltwater traced a heart on our faces, brown and tan, African and Japanese, and you whispered my name.

Not my American name, which teachers and friends shoved into my soul, but my Japanese name, which was stolen from me when I stepped foot in this country with my Asian face.

Sakae.

And I responded with your name, your African name, which you never let anyone rob you of.

Imani.

And the man stared at us and backed away like he realised that love was more powerful than a hate-filled history, japs and slaves and look they're kissing and i was wrong on his face.

You have brown eyes.

I always made fun of you for your brown eyes, saying they were boring.

Truthfully, I was afraid to tell you they were beautiful.

I was afraid to tell you beauty because beauty is a word that sounds rough and false and hurtful.

And you have been hurt too much.

You whispered to me late at night that beauty was the word they used, the word they hummed when they stole your purity and twisted you inside out.

But you also said they used nothing. They said that you were nothing.

I looked you in the eye and told you everything. You were everything.