Esmee West-Agboola: 'Part Two'

Today is my first day of rest.

Today I am skimming scissors through my favourite Ankara dress
that I last wore when it fit.

As we speak,
I am cutting stitches where the fabric gathers
the reckless shades of an undefined blue,
blood filtered orange,
demon-green,
and that mindless beige that lingers like a staring child.

And here I sit, 

under the tentative heat of this english sun,
years and years after the mother of my father also sits
in the yard of Shola's Castle
and mouths my younger girl measurements to an old tailor. 

Only he sits under loud rays.
Sweat contouring the light and age of his face,
dodging the sewing machine he works before him.

Legs crossed on the concrete,
his heels brushing the dust
behind the tiptoeing of young lizards
playing hide and seek with God.
The image plays in parallel with my reality.

Here I breathe,
undoing the placement of his hands on this fabric.
But I can't say I feel wrong.

I loved that dress when I could wear it.
It wore me by a high tide in Mallorca,
where the rainbows of a possibility-facing sea
swam in front, behind, through and inside my body.

Thoroughly
and carefully caressing,
with a delicacy I now miss
standing barefoot in the puddles of
my own messy waterfall.

I think of me
standing
in that dress
and blending in with relief itself.

And so, 

as I cut every careful stitch that once
sealed the spillage of a torn inside,
I think "how funny...I am not bleeding.
What a risk it is to cut you up,
yet I am not scared?"

I speak after action now.

While I used the first morning of rest
to sort through the earrings I was ready to let go
while thinking
what I would do with this dress,

I was reminded by my love
that my mind is free.

And so
the fabric is not in a bag,
but back in my room with me.

Although now it is on either side of my face,
it goes on mending.

That dress now sits on the seabed of my mind,
while these earrings will wash up to the beach
for a while, I guess.

Please return this moment to me when the waters change again,
so that I may write the third part.

Esmee West-Agboola is a PHD student at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. Her research interests include intersectional Black narratives in UK Theatre and institutional constraints to their visibility. More broadly, she is influenced by the politics of diasporic belonging, temporality, Black time and the power of embodied knowledge.