Their different personalities—Seo-Ran is sensitive but outspoken while Eo-Rie is more easy-going and nonchalant—complement each other well, Seo-Ran says.

“Eo-Rie accepted my hyper-sensitiveness with ease, and even joked once, ‘I feel like I have a high-end home cleaner’,” she says, laughing.

Their home life became “joyful, peaceful, and comforting”.

“I came to believe that a real family is those who share their lives while respecting and being loyal to each other, whether or not they are related by blood or marriage,” says Seo-Ran.

A few years later, with the arrangement working so well, they decided to buy their apartment together. But then, after Seo-Ran, who suffers from other health problems like chronic headaches, was rushed to the ER several times, they started talking about how if they were family they could sign medical consent forms for one another. South Korean hospitals, fearing legal action should something go wrong, customarily refuse to offer urgent care—including surgery—unless a patient’s legal family gives consent.

“We have helped and protected one another for years. But we were nothing but strangers when we needed each other most,” Seo-Ran explains.

Like the album and tour with which it shares a name, Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé seeks to be a celebration of Black queer joy. From the start, Beyoncé preaches her desire to create a “safe space.” “Renaissance means a new beginning,” she says; it’s a balm “after all we’ve been through in the world.” But what exactly is she referring to? The onslaught of death and illness brought on by the continuing pandemic? The laws aimed at criminalizing trans children and adults? The rising misogyny, homophobia, and anti-Blackness that leads to grave violence? The various, ongoing genocides? Beyoncé gives us no context for what she’s referring to or how it touches the shores of a life dominated and driven by the kind of wealth that insulates her from harm. Her words reflect broadly liberal pablum meant to give the appearance of care and mean just enough that her fans can project radicalness upon her but not so much that she would ruffle anyone enough for her to lose money or be forced to stand for something.

Beyoncé has been a remote star for years, someone far more content with having her dedicated Hive project upon her than speaking for herself. This makes the behind-the-scenes moments of her latest concert documentary, which are so primed toward engendering intimacy, rather curious. Every time you think you’ve seen behind the curtain, you realize there’s another curtain upon another stage. This isn’t new for her. Consider previous projects like the labored 2013 film Life Is But a Dream and the more successfully realized Homecoming in 2019. From this vantage point, fake intimacy is a currency she utilizes to give the appearance of revelation even if she actually remains as closed as a fist. Beyoncé positions herself not as a goddess bestowing a peek of humanity to her loyal subjects but as a relatable figure we can and should connect with. But if you have cameras on you all the time, even when you’re supposed to be “off,” when do you take down the performative mask? It isn’t even when she has knee surgery, a moment carefully documented on camera. For Beyoncé, a woman known to film her every move and house it in a temperature-controlled archive, everything is performance and each performance is merely a means of brand extension.

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One of my favorite get-to-know-you questions is, “What’s the first concert you went to?” Whether a cool act or a cringy one, talking about that experience always stirs people’s emotions—and I get a better understanding of the person telling the story. At that moment, I see a glimpse of their younger self. 

My first concert was Depeche Mode, the masters of 1980s industrial-tinged synth pop. I remember buzzing with anticipation alongside my sister Rachel, then howling with thousands of our fellow teenagers when the lights dropped. As the band walked on stage, a distinctive series of notes echoed through the suburban arena, and the song “Black Celebration” began. We were all dressed in black, ready to celebrate. It was perfect. 

A few decades later, Rachel and I took our daughters to their first concert: the boy-band phenomenon One Direction. The girls liked their music but were hardly superfans; my sister and I were the ones who really wanted to go. (An attempt to recapture our lost youth, perhaps.) The band seemed aware of this intergenerational dynamic; at one point, Harry Styles took the mic and thanked all “the mums and grandmums who drove tonight.” It was both mortifying and hilarious. I hope my daughter enjoys telling that story one day. 

Thanks to pent-up, post-COVID demand, it’s been a great year for concerts. Ed Sheeran set attendance records during his recent United States tour, and Taylor Swift and Beyoncé did their share of filling stadiums, with Swift’s The Eras Tour already the highest-grossing concert film of all time. There’s something about losing yourself in a communal experience that’s immensely appealing in this age of virtual meetings and not-so-social media. We want to see the artists we love in person. We want to believe they’re singing directly to us. 

With streaming services paying minuscule amounts per song played, most musicians can no longer support themselves through recordings alone, so touring has become a financial necessity. While icons such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan can still draw a crowd by simply singing on a stage, other musical acts lure audiences with special effects, multiple costume changes, and eye-popping sets. The singer Pink even does high-flying aerial stunts during her shows. 

This reading list takes you on a mini-tour of different concert experiences, from moments of emotional connection to high-tech extravaganzas that are creating an entirely new kind of show. 

I Paid to See Beyonce in Three Different Cities on the Renaissance Tour. Here’s Why (Malaika Jabali, Essence, September 2023)

For Essence editor Malaika Jabali, Beyoncé’s album Renaissance was a lifeline, “a jolt of infectious energy pumped into our veins after two years of angst and despair.” She considered herself lucky to get tickets to see her musical idol in Toronto, but seeing the show only made her want to go again—and again. She even caught a last-minute flight from Atlanta to Tampa when she was able to get resale tickets hours before the Florida show. 

Jabali’s essay starts with a confession: “My name is Malaika, and I have a problem.” By framing Beyoncé’s concerts as a form of addiction, she explains how fandom can turn into near-obsession. Why else would anyone pay so much for last-minute tickets, let alone a madcap rush to the airport? 

Before reading this piece, I’d forgotten how much it means to see one of your musical idols in person. The Renaissance tour, Jabali writes, was a tribute to Beyoncé’s most die-hard followers, celebrating influences and references that resonated on a personal level. 

U2 Takes to Playing in the Round (the Very, Very Round) at Las Vegas’ Sphere With Spectacular Results: Concert Review (Chris Willman, Variety, September 2023) 

How does one of the world’s longest-running rock bands keep themselves relevant? By performing a one-of-a-kind show in a one-of-a-kind venue. U2 was the debut act of the recently opened Sphere in Las Vegas, and music critic Chris Willman says it was an apt pairing, “the apotheosis of a bigger-is-better ethos that has regularly occurred throughout the band’s career, and which they are not about to give up now that they’re in their 60s for any back-to-basics false modesty.” 

As a U2 listener from way back, I was curious about their latest reinvention; if money were no object, I’d have been dancing in the Sphere alongside Willman on opening night. Reading this account was the next best thing. Willman’s descriptions of the visuals that accompany each song are particularly vivid, but the show’s real brilliance, he writes, comes from the band’s ability to connect to its audience, despite the cavernous space.

The group that has spent so much of its recording output urging you to think about God, and other only slightly less weighty matters, is in Sin City mostly to make you say: “Oh my God.” And we can vouch that we were hearing that utterance, from people above, below and around us, in a kind of reactive, quadraphonic effect that nearly matched Sphere’s vaunted 22nd-century sound system.

This being U2, they would like to be seen as an overgrown club band at their core, at the same time they are producing the rock blockbuster to end all blockbusters. Wanting to have it both ways has worked for the group before, and it works again, in this setting. . . .  It’s a cliche to say that U2 can achieve intimacy in the midst of the most ridiculous extravaganza, but nobody in rock history has done a better job of taking visual and aesthetic dynamics to extremes. 

How Park Jimin of BTS Helped Me Feel Seen in My Brown, Queer Body (Padya Paramita, them, February 2021)

Like plenty of others in the COVID lockdown era, Padya Paramita dived into the music of K Pop superstars BTS as a form of escape. Even before the world shut down, she hadn’t been sure how to reconcile her conservative Bangladeshi upbringing with the gender non-conformity she’d experienced at her American college: “I struggled to share my pronouns and was confused about what they even were.” Being isolated at home only made that confusion catastrophically worse. 

Then she watched BTS play an online concert that was live-streamed to almost a million fans around the world—and a performance of the song “Filter” by singer/dancer Park Jimin brought her to tears. For me, this piece was a moving example of the power live music can have, even when you’re watching a concert performed halfway around the world.

The K-pop industry is heavily gendered. There have only been a handful of mixed gender bands among hundreds of boy and girl groups, and being openly queer is often completely out of the question for most K-pop stars — even heterosexual artists aren’t allowed to date publicly. Despite everything, Jimin started coming out of his shell, openly wearing outfits originally designed for women, shirts with the words “gender equality” and “radical feminist,” laughing at his bandmates for claiming selfies aren’t for men, and letting his dance moves flow freely.

Jimin reminded me of myself — I was born 75 days before him, 2500 miles away. Yet both of us had tried hard to please society and performed gender in a way we weren’t meant to put on. It both took us time to realize that society’s gender norms weren’t the law, there was no “male” or “female” when it came to fashion and behavior. We would still be loved, even if we took the risk of expressing ourselves in a real way.

The Story of the First Ever Glastonbury Festival (El Hunt, NME, June 2023)

Woodstock in 1969 was an era-defining event, paving the way for a new kind of concert: multiple bands playing outside over multiple days, to an audience of young people who were willing to put up with rain, mud, sunburn, and questionable portable toilets. Today, festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza are big businesses, with VIP tents sponsored by corporate brands. 

The Glastonbury Festival in England is one such success story, but as El Hunt writes in this appreciation, it started with “1500 hippies, five dogs, and one goat.” The festival’s co-creator, Michael Eavis, was a dairy farmer with “grand ambitions and a hefty overdraft,” who thought hosting an event on his land would be a good way to make money. (It didn’t quite work out that way.) 

Interviewing some of the original attendees, Hunt paints a picture of a more carefree time, when festivalgoers not only didn’t worry about pulling together Instagram-worthy outfits but often arrived with no luggage at all. Their memories take us back to a long-gone spirit of open-minded adventure when no one was quite sure what they’d find when they reached the festival grounds. 

Entry for punters cost £1, the equivalent of £5 in today’s money, and for that you got a carton of milk from the dairy farm. 

There was no super fence to keep out gatecrashers. In fact, when a group of hippies walked all the way to the farm from London thinking it was a free festival, the crowd chipped in for their entry fees. Advertising for the event was minimal, and info was spread by word-of-mouth. Attendance was far lower than the 3000 people expected, and Eavis didn’t break even, let alone earn enough to clear his overdraft. “It hasn’t been a disaster,” he told the BBC afterwards. “But it hasn’t been as good as I hoped.”

ABBA Voyage Concert Review (Paul Sinclair, Super Deluxe Edition, May 2022) 

Even at the height of their late-’70s/early-’80s fame, the Swedish pop phenomenon ABBA played relatively few live shows. As other nostalgia acts reunited in recent years, ABBA resisted the lure of a hefty comeback-tour paycheck; as music writer Paul Sinclair puts it, “45 years from their heyday, all four members are in their seventies and have concluded that no one wants, or needs, to see ‘old ABBA’ on stage, least of all them!” 

But was there a way to get “young ABBA” back? Sinclair describes the journey that led to ABBA Voyage, a London show starring the “ABBAtars,” 3D virtual images that perform alongside a live band. Why would anyone want to sit through an entire concert’s worth of holograms, I wondered? Then I read Sinclair’s review of the opening-night performance. Like me, Sinclair went in full of doubts, which were quickly swept away by a wave of ABBA-licious magic. 

ABBA Voyage is like some kind of wonderland. For 90 minutes you believe the unbelievable. I was concerned that I might have to work hard to enjoy the evening, but actually the suspension of disbelief is easy. Why? Because ABBA in their primes are standing right in front of you. Your brain might be trying to tell you it’s not real, but your heart, your databank of emotions – love, joy, regret, sadness – are tripping on overload. . . .

It seems inconceivable – and ultimately become irrelevant – that we are witnessing images on a 65-million-pixel flat screen. I’m still not sure I believe it. When the show starts, the lighting in the 3000-seat arena drops very low –but not so low that you can’t see the other people you are sitting amongst. This sense of a communal experience – laughing, singing, and crying and dancing to ABBA with other people – was very important to producer Svana Gisla, and I can understand why. Total darkness is too isolating. It’s these kinds of details that make all the difference. 

Survivors of Concert Violence Speak Out (Quinn Moreland, Pitchfork, March 2018)

Any time large numbers of people come together in a confined space, there’s a chance of things going wrong. When the Rolling Stones decided to play a show at the Altamont Speedway in California and hired the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang as security, it led to one of the first, most notorious concert disasters: a fan was stabbed to death while trying to rush the stage. 

Sadly, the death toll has risen significantly since then. For this piece, Moreland interviewed the survivors of four different tragedies: the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris; the suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England; the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida; and the shooting at the Route 91 country-music festival in Las Vegas. In their own words, these witnesses describe how the experience affected the way they process large, public events. Some always look for an exit route when they go to a new venue; others check how much security is evident. 

What’s striking is how many of those people still go to concerts. Before reading these accounts, I assumed that anyone who’d experienced such traumatic violence would stay away from crowded events entirely. A few have, of course, but I was touched and inspired by the stories of those who’ve refused to give up on live music. For Steve Munoz, a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting, going to concerts has even become a form of healing. 

Before that weekend, I’d never been to a music festival before, but I’m definitely more obsessed with going to concerts now. Listening to country music was a big part of it. I have all kinds of tastes when it comes to music, but ever since Route 91, I’ve only really listened to country. I felt like if I did not listen to music, I was giving that guy control because I would be associating all the evil that had happened with the music of that night. We all heal and deal with things differently, but for me, the music was what helped me get past the darkness of that night.

Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day. 

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Cherise Morris | Longreads | October 2018 | 22 minutes (4,598 words)

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of ‘love’”? I asked you this question four months into our relationship, while writing an essay about love for a contest I never entered.

This was long before we exchanged the L-word, back when the winter’s cold gave us short days and long nights spent with no one but each other.

“Uh, can we come back to that one? Gimme some more options first.”

So, we did a quick word association activity. I stated words and you responded with the first thing each brought to mind.

I said, “water.”

You said, “me.”

“Tree.” “Life.”

“Windows.” “Light.”

“Ground.” “Floor.”

I said, “air.”

And you said, “love.”

Then, with the smile of a fox you replied, “Ah, I see what you did there.”

***

I was born in the image of my mother with broken teeth and a half-broken heart to match; air gave birth to air. My mother is an Aquarius, and I, a Libra — both “air signs” — and perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along.

I watched her, full-hearted and lonesome my entire childhood and adolescence, longing to be consumed by a certain kind of fairytale love. A love which never lies to you, never takes you for granted, never hurts or harms. But if I know anything to be true, it is that the perfection of fairytales is a grandiose illusion, which is why we love them so. Little girls are taught to long for the fairytale love stories of princesses far more than the bittersweet kind that grow us into goddesses.

According modern western astrology, Libra is the cardinal air sign of the zodiac, ruled by Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love, which governs the ways Libras seek and build relationships. We value affirmation, aesthetics and the rosier side of justice above all else. At all costs we seek to avoid the topsy-turvy shakiness of conflict and anything less than perfect equilibrium, while often settling for pseudo-perfect if it will keep the boat from rocking for a while. Those living under the sign represented by the cosmic scales are obsessed with the romance of keeping up appearances, and thus, are predisposed to a sometimes-never-ending quest for alignment and acceptance through partnerships. They exalt a fabled euphoria, a dream of being made to feel weightless by the love of another. But if I know anything to be true, it is that love, despite its intangibility, is the weightiest of matters.

Although, one’s approach to love and relationships can’t be simply boiled down to the properties associated with one’s sun sign. Astrology is more complex than that. But back when I started to live this story, I did not yet have a nuanced understanding of the workings of the cosmos. I fell into the predictability of the Libran archetype, wanting to fall in love only to feel what it was like to be loved.

***

During the brief period of flirtation which would lead to my first “I love you,” long before I ever met you, I was obsessed with Drake’s 2013 SoundCloud release, “Girls Love Beyoncé.” While I did not share Drake’s playing-the-field sort of aversion to commitment, I did connect with his disdain for games and uncertainty and apprehension regarding letting in new friends — symptoms of a distrust borne of having been burned before. He punctuated it all with references to Beyoncé’s iconography.

Say my name, say my name

And this ain’t no time for actin’

And this ain’t no time for games

And this ain’t no time for uncertainty

And this ain’t no time for locking your phone and not coming home

And startin’ some shit when I’m in the zone

This is why I’ve been saying

No new friends, no no no

I’ve always reserved a special space in my heart for Beyoncé. “Dangerously in Love” was the first CD I ever owned, the only gift I asked my mother for on my 10th birthday. I was now a big girl, officially in the double-digits of life, and I would hide in the tube slide at recess listening to Bey’s silky vocals about topics of which I knew nothing. My favorite song on the album back then was track eight, “Signs,” a novice’s journey through the zodiac of love, one of the album’s deeper cuts which never earned a visual accompaniment.

Beyoncé is a prime example of the Virgo’s highest vibrations — the perfectionism she brings to her craft, the earthy femininity of her aesthetics, and her knack for material abundance.

A keeper of records, I do not easily forgive or forget. I hold a running tally in my mind, ensuring no lover’s flaw goes unnoticed, no wrong un-reckoned with.

I would come to understand, four years after Drake’s release, that I, too, had some of these Virgo attributes. Venus in my natal chart is, to its detriment, ruled by Virgo. This means, at my best, I bring a down-to-earth approach to courtship and show my affection in practical yet endearing ways, and, at my worst, exhibit a persnickety, nitpicky drive for perfection in my affairs. A keeper of records, I do not easily forgive or forget. I hold a running tally in my mind, ensuring no lover’s flaw goes unnoticed, no wrong un-reckoned with.

***

The first conversations you and I had during our brief courtship were about astrology and other universal and metaphysical mysteries. I had been studying my lay practice for four years then and gained a deeper understanding of the belief system than you, and most other people.

I knew my mother’s Aquarius moon made her a pro at concealing the vulnerability of her romanticism in a veil of hippy-dippy Aquarian longings for freedom and detachment. I knew my Capricorn rising made me seem well-versed in feeling unbothered, to those who didn’t know me, like you at the time. But it also gave me an acute awareness of how, once we’d broken through the inertia of outward appearances, that facade would soon be shattered by my Cancer moon, the sign of your sun, and the most emotional of all moons. And I knew from the beginning that I was in for a challenge I had wanted to avoid at all costs with you and your uncertain Gemini moon, the most difficult of all lunar placements.

***

At the core of the essay I wrote for the contest I never entered was a lesson I had been fortunate enough to learn during my junior year of high school, back before “RuPaul’s Drag Race” became trendy. A sage RuPaul would end every episode by asking the contestants and thus the viewers, “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?” And though this RuPaul-ism has become somewhat trite against the performativity of commercialism and reality show competition editing, it remains a cardinal truth of the human experience.

I had come to further understand this truth during the two-year decline of my first serious relationship, which I walked away from after meeting you.

The week before I discovered your lies, while having one of our umpteenth debates about monogamy, something you’ve always been afraid of, you told me “I don’t know how to love myself yet. I think that’s what it is.” Acceptance.

***

Two months before your straying, in the lonely aftermath of one of our arguments, I had the impulse to re-watch Beyonce’s “Lemonade” in its entirety and feel my way through the emotional landscape of once again being the one on the other side of infidelity. Lemonade is an epic poem of Odyssey, of finding oneself in false calms before the storm of broken trust, and its destructive aftermaths . It is a story of having to break down to come back together and break through.

In sequence, Beyoncé’s self-reflective ode to devoted women who have been done wrong and taken for granted, journeys through the minefield of her eleven stages of emotional recovery: from intuition to denial, anger to apathy, emptiness to accountability, reformation to resurrection, and hope to end of a note of redemption.

I sat in a dim room lit only by candlelight, divining a prophecy I hoped to reject as paranoia, to the tune of Yoncé’s heartbreak, resolve and triumph. I fantasized about you touching her, your tongue between her lips. I cried, trying to predict whether you would have kept going, or my image would have popped into your mind, stopping you in the tracks of your bad judgement, the way you said it had before. I imagined the moment you’d come home to me after the dirt of the deed, tell me the somber truth, and repent, and beg for forgiveness, and to have my heart back. I thought of how you’d wrap your passed down lips around mine to siphon out the hurt, and how I’d make you, on your knees, wrap that cheating mouth around me and make me feel like the queen I know I am, bowing before me.

But the inherent spontaneity of the universe ensures things never play out in the exact sequence you envision. When you cheated two months later, you came home five hours late. Without words or confession, you hugged me in a manner I was not supposed to read as consoling. You never told me, didn’t have the decency to grant me the immediate freedom of absolute certainty. You didn’t possess the self-respect and courage it takes to stand in the openness of your wrongs as you had promised you would, and had made me promise I would. You did the same thing that had been done to you, the thing that had made you walk away from the woman who’d done it to you. And worse, you did it with that very same woman. And when you realized how much easier it was to stay caught in the two-faced limbo of deception, you stuck to the idleness of concealing the actions you knew would cut me deeper than anything else ever could.

In the twenty days after your transgression, each time you prodded me about monogamy; each time you questioned my unwavering faithfulness and made me defend myself against things I had never done and never thought of doing; each time you gave me those lost puppy-dog eyes when speaking of the hypothetical of adultery and told me, “It’s gonna happen. I know I’m going to do it,” it was neither warning nor worry so much as it was a coward’s admission of guilt.

Two years before you ever entered my life, when a friend sent me her bootlegged copy of “Lemonade” two years ago, I named the files “w/e,” shorthand for “whatever,” and never knew why. The brilliant and beautiful compilation was anything but whatever. I now know that was my first divination of your infidelity and the challenges it would create, long before I knew you.

“‘Whatever’ is like my new my favorite word right now,” I would tell you offhand one afternoon during the 20-day period in which you lied to me, “I don’t know — everything just feels like whatever right now.” Apathy.

***

My mother and I haven’t lived together in six years, but we coexist in analogy. We’ve sat side by side across the distances of time and space waiting for our age of Aquarius, watching days gone by, letting the smoke trails of cigarettes say what we can not. We’ve shared lofty hopes and dreams of one day living in a high-rise, thinking that would be the closest we’d ever come to flying. When one of us slogged through the depths of depression, looking back towards lovers who walked away and love that never came, the other did, too. When one of us thrived, bathed in the currents of newfound infatuations, the other did, too. Together, we’ve willed ourselves back to wellness, willed ourselves to speak and to listen.

Back in January of 2017, we each set new year’s intentions over a long-distance phone call, both promising to let go of what no longer served us, which led to the endings of our respective long-term relationships.

Three months into that year, she called me yet again with sadness in her voice, and it broke my heart because I’ve heard her cry so many more tears than she deserves to cry. She told me she worried about leaving this lifetime without ever knowing the feeling of having been loved, and in love.

Underneath the veneer of my somewhat naïve Libra hopefulness and Capricorn rising self-assuredness, there lived the intimate connection of knowing when you can’t trust another woman’s intentions.

Later that evening I wrote a letter to her which I never sent. I wrote about Oshun, one of the African goddesses, or “Orisha,” that I worship. Oshun, the mother of sweet waters, love, prosperity and fertility, is the most beautiful and radiant woman in all the pantheon with a golden personality, an enchanting dance and an enormous heart.

“I am the image of the Oshun who dances and laughs like a hyena,” I wrote, “And you are the Oshun who dances and weeps, the one who is always looking and longing for the love she deserves, the one who cries because her world is not nearly as beautiful as it should be.”

I told her, “I want you to focus on loving yourself harder than you ever have. Before I could receive the type of love I needed, I had to get to a place of loving myself more than I had ever imagined I could. You gotta take this time to love you and only you so you can heal and be full enough for the sort of love you deserve to receive.”

And as I wrote that letter I never sent, I hugged myself, feeling all the love she’d filled my life with, and understanding it as the foundation of the love I now know for myself.

***

Four Sundays before, when you went to visit your ex-girlfriend of four years, I didn’t put up a fight because perhaps deep in the fog of my subconscious I had already accepted the truth of what would happen. She had always been a source of tension between us, a relationship archetype — or at least of the relationship I pattern myself into — the clingy ex who refuses to move on.

But for the first time ever I was not perturbed by this meeting. After a year-and-a-half of your having been separated from her, and too many hours-long conscious uncoupling conversations between you two for me to keep count of, you had promised me it was over. And I looked forward to the day when she would no longer have the power to draw cortisol through my nerves, and you and she could be friends without longing for anything more.

“You have nothing to worry about,” you told me before you left and I believed you.

But underneath the veneer of my somewhat naïve Libra hopefulness and Capricorn rising self-assuredness, there lived the intimate connection of knowing when you can’t trust another woman’s intentions.

I brushed away this intuition, passed it off as unwarranted insecurity and spent hours alone in your apartment trying to match my pitch with Beyoncé’s, singing along to the sexy serenade “Rocket” from her 2013 self-titled album, while you were out until after midnight, making out and dry humping and cumming on her back, which you somehow rationalized as less harmful because it wasn’t “going all the way.”

The weekend before you got caught, you asked me if I wanted to meet her, “She wants to go out with us tonight…She said she really wants to meet you.”

“Huh?” I responded. And you said the look in my eyes was that of someone who could kill you, and then, you deflected your lies by criticizing my anger as excessive.

Later that evening, we saw two cars narrowly avoid a crash, tires screeching, and you acted as if you saw no synchronous correlation to your earlier proposal of a big fun menage a trois, which grew into an argument about our favorite subject. When I told you she still wanted to be with you, on our way home at the end of the night, you pretended as if you had no idea, the same way you pretended not to know what I was talking about when you woke up the night I found out and I asked you what you had to done with her in the back of the van.

The day after the near car crash, Beyoncé and Jay Z release their duo album “EVERYTHING IS LOVE,” under their pseudonym, “The Carters”. The work speaks to the couple’s shared trials, tribulations and successes against the backdrop of nouveau riche opulence.

Over those 20 days of self-inflicted purgatory, you asked me multiple times if I was open to taking her as a third — a selfish and deluded last-ditch effort to prevent yourself from feeling the weight of guilt and the itch of shame, shrouded in a bad joke.

The morning before the night I discovered the truth, finding the evidence while digging through your text messages. At the witching hour of 3 am, she sent you some self-pitying bullshit about releasing, which I knew was more of an attempt to win you back than a commitment to letting you go. I preached to you my tough love sermon on moving on, and forward. And you showed your insensitivity and selfishness yet again asking me, “You sure you don’t wanna just bring her into this thing we got?”

And when you said, “I just don’t want to hurt her,” you really meant you didn’t want to hurt me more than you already had, and what you really didn’t want was have to face the consequences.

***

Four days after an Aries full moon spelled the cosmic demise of my first relationship, the day after my birthday and seven days before our first date, I called my psychic, Lori. She told me the most important part of any relationship is what it teaches you and asked me to write a letter, which I never sent, to an ex, who had always wanted nothing more than for me to write about her and us.

You and she share strange traits. You both were raised by Capricorn fathers who you share tense relationships with. You’re both going gray early. You both find solace in woodworking and experienced an exodus of friends from your lives upon meeting me. Neither of you care much for Beyoncé’s music. Both of your ex-girlfriends seemed to want to adhere harder once I entered your lives. And you both felt comfortable slipping into sin with these ex-girlfriends a few months into your relationships with me, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to break me, the “Strong. Black. Woman.” you had both hoped for, the one who would be tough enough to withstand your faults.

By the time I accepted the truth of your lies, I understood Drake even more when he said, “You know how this shit goes/This is not four years ago.”

“The one rule I made” you said.

“You broke,” I retorted.

The one thing you asked of me, which was to never lie to you about anything that had happened with anyone else, you couldn’t reciprocate.

And I told you, you had done the worst possible thing: ripped open a wound in me that had healed, or so I’d thought. I made you tell me what I meant to you as you shrunk in the driver’s seat of the truck you had first kissed her in.

My Mercury in Scorpio was in full effect, and I enjoyed seeing you waste away, and knowing my words could make you feel small.

I was “the fire of the sun, the give and take of oxygen, the flow of water, and the fruits of earth that give life.” And I understood, in that moment, why you did what you had done, because you are only human. And humans haven’t yet given up their short-sighted impulses to disrespect and destroy the very things which sustain them.

***

After I first watched “Lemonade,” I brought it into the arts workshop I facilitated at the women’s prison three weeks in a row, due to popular demand. An audience of women who had ended up behind bars because of their responses to jilted lovers’ indiscretions; accessories to fraudulent finances and drug dealing and car theft; defenders at all costs who had harbored fugitive suitors; victims to the sort of anger that emerges from ripped-open pre-existing wounds and the sort heartache deep enough to make you try to kill yourself, or someone else. These were ride or die chicks burned in the ashes of far-from-Hollywood myths about quotidian Bonnies and Clydes.

***

It was the summer solstice and we celebrated in a simple ritual with my married friends, writing our intentions down and sending them up in a paper lantern. I snapped into an unexplained anger later in the night as we got ready for sleep.

“You better appreciate me,” I said to you, echoing a warning of which you were well-aware and had heard many times before.

You flipped it, rolled over and sucked your teeth, “You don’t appreciate me.” I sprang to my defense, I told you how beautiful and deserving and good and worthy you were and that, “I hope you can one day learn to love yourself.” And I cradled you until you pushed me away, saying it was too hot, but meaning that you knew you didn’t deserve my gestures of affection because you lay chained in guilt, using every insecurity you could muster to make what you had done feel ok to yourself.

Before we went to sleep and before I woke up to the nightmare from which I watched the next morning’s sunrise with you, I asked you, “What did you write on the paper lantern?”

“I wished for a long and happy marriage with you, and kids.”

The morning after the fallout of your mess, my friend calls me to talk through their confusing recent break up.

“It’s like just last month we were talking about having kids… and now this,” she said.

“You know,” I said, taking a breath to process what had just happened to me earlier that morning, “the universe is a beautiful thing, but it can be a tricky motherfucker sometimes. When you put those sorts of intentions out there, and you’re open to it, the universe will test you. If you had kids this would be ten thousand times worse. So, if that is truly your intention for the future, you have to work through the muck of the present to prove you are committed to and capable of getting there.”

I had brushed aside my impulse to look through your phone as neurosis, and forced myself asleep. When I woke up at 3:45 am, the tea light candle I had lit on my ancestral altar was still burning. I remembered a meme I had seen the day before while scrolling through Facebook, and the unexplainable urge I had felt to send it to you:

Then I saw the message from her, second in your text list, right under one you had sent to me, and I felt my heart bursting. My initial numbness unraveled to ticking rage, as my Mars in Scorpio would have it, and I looked at you and thought over the past 20 days and wanted to kill you.

You woke up at 4:44, a synchronous occurrence, the hour Jay Z claims to have woken up in revelation and penned his 13th album and musical repentance, “4:44.”

***

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about the moments just after you woke up. What you said and felt, how and where you looked.

In a moment of revelation, I ask myself why every serious or semi-serious partner I’d ever had had cheated on me.

Would it be that all people regardless of gender, age, background, class or sexual orientation have the ability to descend into the selfishness of philandering? Or that non-monogamy is an inevitable return to the truest human nature? Or that people just like fucking with me? Perhaps, it’s some imperfect alchemy of one or all of these reasons.

And it is quite possible that why it happened has everything to do with you and nothing to do with me.

But if this has happened to me in literally every relationship I’ve ever had for more than two weeks, why was I still so afraid of it?

I wonder how much of that initial Lemonade premonition was intuition? How much of it had been divine intervention, a manifestation of my biggest fears, crystalized into one selfish act over and over again to present me with the possibility to face my fears head on; to conquer them; and to soar far above them.

***

You made excuses — said you did it because your life was in chaos and her Scorpio sun sign eyes know how to pull your Scorpio rising back into the toxicity of what you two had. When you can’t deal with my explosive anger, I say, “Too fucking bad,” because my Scorpio Mars placement knows how to turn me into a powder keg that could destroy anything or anyone in a moment’s breath, and my politicized Black woman anger makes me feel like I’ll kill you and her both, and bury you side-by-side in the same plot in the cemetery. I guess the new thing to do is use astrology as an excuse for the parts of ourselves we don’t want to change.

I saw the message from her, second in your text list, right under one you had sent to me, and I felt my heart bursting. My initial numbness unraveled to ticking rage.

When I kicked you out of my bed at midnight the next day, I asked you why your Cancer sun couldn’t think of the pain you’d cause my Cancer moon with enough time to prevent it and you blamed it on not knowing what you wanted and not wanting to feel trapped in something real.

You wrote to me at 3:45 a.m., long after I was asleep. You told me you were haunted by your actions and that you would repent by any means necessary and asked if, in time, I could ever forgive you.

As much as I know our astrological predispositions are never an appropriate excuse and we always have free will in our actions and responses, I also know that resentment is a powerful spell which binds you to the object of your disdain, and in the words of Beyoncé on “LOVEHAPPY,” the concluding track of “EVERYTHING IS LOVE,” and my personal favorite: “Nightmares only last a night.” Release.

In life, we always have the choice to let ourselves fall back into the comfort of sameness — the same old actions and responses and resentments we’ve carried this far — or we can move a little closer to freedom by trying something new and letting go. I could have been mad at you and rightfully stayed mad about it and stopped believing in you or anything you had to offer me. But I think that would have been to comfortable to make me a better version of myself.

I keep an altar to Oshun next to my bed, a breathing tribute to the Mami Wata goddess who weeps because she knows life is nowhere near as beautiful as it could be, and that love is the most bittersweet thing in this world, and I admire Libra rising, Scorpio moon Beyoncé most when she’s draped in gold.

And you know girls love Beyoncé and I take my cues from goddesses, knowing that, as Beyonce sings, “Nothing real can be threatened,” and “I believe you can change.”

So, with a teary inhale, I tell you that “we’re gonna heal, we’re gonna start again.”

Love.

* * *

Cherise Morris is a Detroit-based writer and spiritualist. Her essays have previously appeared in The Feminist Wire, Bustle, Fourth Genre, and The Iowa Review.

Editor: Sari Botton

Cherise Morris | Longreads | October 2018 | 22 minutes (4,598 words)

“What’s the first word that comes to mind when you think of ‘love’”? I asked you this question four months into our relationship, while writing an essay about love for a contest I never entered.

This was long before we exchanged the L-word, back when the winter’s cold gave us short days and long nights spent with no one but each other.

“Uh, can we come back to that one? Gimme some more options first.”

So, we did a quick word association activity. I stated words and you responded with the first thing each brought to mind.

I said, “water.”

You said, “me.”

“Tree.” “Life.”

“Windows.” “Light.”

“Ground.” “Floor.”

I said, “air.”

And you said, “love.”

Then, with the smile of a fox you replied, “Ah, I see what you did there.”

***

I was born in the image of my mother with broken teeth and a half-broken heart to match; air gave birth to air. My mother is an Aquarius, and I, a Libra — both “air signs” — and perhaps that’s why we’ve always gotten along.

I watched her, full-hearted and lonesome my entire childhood and adolescence, longing to be consumed by a certain kind of fairytale love. A love which never lies to you, never takes you for granted, never hurts or harms. But if I know anything to be true, it is that the perfection of fairytales is a grandiose illusion, which is why we love them so. Little girls are taught to long for the fairytale love stories of princesses far more than the bittersweet kind that grow us into goddesses.

According modern western astrology, Libra is the cardinal air sign of the zodiac, ruled by Venus, the planet named for the Roman goddess of love, which governs the ways Libras seek and build relationships. We value affirmation, aesthetics and the rosier side of justice above all else. At all costs we seek to avoid the topsy-turvy shakiness of conflict and anything less than perfect equilibrium, while often settling for pseudo-perfect if it will keep the boat from rocking for a while. Those living under the sign represented by the cosmic scales are obsessed with the romance of keeping up appearances, and thus, are predisposed to a sometimes-never-ending quest for alignment and acceptance through partnerships. They exalt a fabled euphoria, a dream of being made to feel weightless by the love of another. But if I know anything to be true, it is that love, despite its intangibility, is the weightiest of matters.

Although, one’s approach to love and relationships can’t be simply boiled down to the properties associated with one’s sun sign. Astrology is more complex than that. But back when I started to live this story, I did not yet have a nuanced understanding of the workings of the cosmos. I fell into the predictability of the Libran archetype, wanting to fall in love only to feel what it was like to be loved.

***

During the brief period of flirtation which would lead to my first “I love you,” long before I ever met you, I was obsessed with Drake’s 2013 SoundCloud release, “Girls Love Beyoncé.” While I did not share Drake’s playing-the-field sort of aversion to commitment, I did connect with his disdain for games and uncertainty and apprehension regarding letting in new friends — symptoms of a distrust borne of having been burned before. He punctuated it all with references to Beyoncé’s iconography.

Say my name, say my name

And this ain’t no time for actin’

And this ain’t no time for games

And this ain’t no time for uncertainty

And this ain’t no time for locking your phone and not coming home

And startin’ some shit when I’m in the zone

This is why I’ve been saying

No new friends, no no no

I’ve always reserved a special space in my heart for Beyoncé. “Dangerously in Love” was the first CD I ever owned, the only gift I asked my mother for on my 10th birthday. I was now a big girl, officially in the double-digits of life, and I would hide in the tube slide at recess listening to Bey’s silky vocals about topics of which I knew nothing. My favorite song on the album back then was track eight, “Signs,” a novice’s journey through the zodiac of love, one of the album’s deeper cuts which never earned a visual accompaniment.

Beyoncé is a prime example of the Virgo’s highest vibrations — the perfectionism she brings to her craft, the earthy femininity of her aesthetics, and her knack for material abundance.

A keeper of records, I do not easily forgive or forget. I hold a running tally in my mind, ensuring no lover’s flaw goes unnoticed, no wrong un-reckoned with.

I would come to understand, four years after Drake’s release, that I, too, had some of these Virgo attributes. Venus in my natal chart is, to its detriment, ruled by Virgo. This means, at my best, I bring a down-to-earth approach to courtship and show my affection in practical yet endearing ways, and, at my worst, exhibit a persnickety, nitpicky drive for perfection in my affairs. A keeper of records, I do not easily forgive or forget. I hold a running tally in my mind, ensuring no lover’s flaw goes unnoticed, no wrong un-reckoned with.

***

The first conversations you and I had during our brief courtship were about astrology and other universal and metaphysical mysteries. I had been studying my lay practice for four years then and gained a deeper understanding of the belief system than you, and most other people.

I knew my mother’s Aquarius moon made her a pro at concealing the vulnerability of her romanticism in a veil of hippy-dippy Aquarian longings for freedom and detachment. I knew my Capricorn rising made me seem well-versed in feeling unbothered, to those who didn’t know me, like you at the time. But it also gave me an acute awareness of how, once we’d broken through the inertia of outward appearances, that facade would soon be shattered by my Cancer moon, the sign of your sun, and the most emotional of all moons. And I knew from the beginning that I was in for a challenge I had wanted to avoid at all costs with you and your uncertain Gemini moon, the most difficult of all lunar placements.

***

At the core of the essay I wrote for the contest I never entered was a lesson I had been fortunate enough to learn during my junior year of high school, back before “RuPaul’s Drag Race” became trendy. A sage RuPaul would end every episode by asking the contestants and thus the viewers, “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?” And though this RuPaul-ism has become somewhat trite against the performativity of commercialism and reality show competition editing, it remains a cardinal truth of the human experience.

I had come to further understand this truth during the two-year decline of my first serious relationship, which I walked away from after meeting you.

The week before I discovered your lies, while having one of our umpteenth debates about monogamy, something you’ve always been afraid of, you told me “I don’t know how to love myself yet. I think that’s what it is.” Acceptance.

***

Two months before your straying, in the lonely aftermath of one of our arguments, I had the impulse to re-watch Beyonce’s “Lemonade” in its entirety and feel my way through the emotional landscape of once again being the one on the other side of infidelity. Lemonade is an epic poem of Odyssey, of finding oneself in false calms before the storm of broken trust, and its destructive aftermaths . It is a story of having to break down to come back together and break through.

In sequence, Beyoncé’s self-reflective ode to devoted women who have been done wrong and taken for granted, journeys through the minefield of her eleven stages of emotional recovery: from intuition to denial, anger to apathy, emptiness to accountability, reformation to resurrection, and hope to end of a note of redemption.

I sat in a dim room lit only by candlelight, divining a prophecy I hoped to reject as paranoia, to the tune of Yoncé’s heartbreak, resolve and triumph. I fantasized about you touching her, your tongue between her lips. I cried, trying to predict whether you would have kept going, or my image would have popped into your mind, stopping you in the tracks of your bad judgement, the way you said it had before. I imagined the moment you’d come home to me after the dirt of the deed, tell me the somber truth, and repent, and beg for forgiveness, and to have my heart back. I thought of how you’d wrap your passed down lips around mine to siphon out the hurt, and how I’d make you, on your knees, wrap that cheating mouth around me and make me feel like the queen I know I am, bowing before me.

But the inherent spontaneity of the universe ensures things never play out in the exact sequence you envision. When you cheated two months later, you came home five hours late. Without words or confession, you hugged me in a manner I was not supposed to read as consoling. You never told me, didn’t have the decency to grant me the immediate freedom of absolute certainty. You didn’t possess the self-respect and courage it takes to stand in the openness of your wrongs as you had promised you would, and had made me promise I would. You did the same thing that had been done to you, the thing that had made you walk away from the woman who’d done it to you. And worse, you did it with that very same woman. And when you realized how much easier it was to stay caught in the two-faced limbo of deception, you stuck to the idleness of concealing the actions you knew would cut me deeper than anything else ever could.

In the twenty days after your transgression, each time you prodded me about monogamy; each time you questioned my unwavering faithfulness and made me defend myself against things I had never done and never thought of doing; each time you gave me those lost puppy-dog eyes when speaking of the hypothetical of adultery and told me, “It’s gonna happen. I know I’m going to do it,” it was neither warning nor worry so much as it was a coward’s admission of guilt.

Two years before you ever entered my life, when a friend sent me her bootlegged copy of “Lemonade” two years ago, I named the files “w/e,” shorthand for “whatever,” and never knew why. The brilliant and beautiful compilation was anything but whatever. I now know that was my first divination of your infidelity and the challenges it would create, long before I knew you.

“‘Whatever’ is like my new my favorite word right now,” I would tell you offhand one afternoon during the 20-day period in which you lied to me, “I don’t know — everything just feels like whatever right now.” Apathy.

***

My mother and I haven’t lived together in six years, but we coexist in analogy. We’ve sat side by side across the distances of time and space waiting for our age of Aquarius, watching days gone by, letting the smoke trails of cigarettes say what we can not. We’ve shared lofty hopes and dreams of one day living in a high-rise, thinking that would be the closest we’d ever come to flying. When one of us slogged through the depths of depression, looking back towards lovers who walked away and love that never came, the other did, too. When one of us thrived, bathed in the currents of newfound infatuations, the other did, too. Together, we’ve willed ourselves back to wellness, willed ourselves to speak and to listen.

Back in January of 2017, we each set new year’s intentions over a long-distance phone call, both promising to let go of what no longer served us, which led to the endings of our respective long-term relationships.

Three months into that year, she called me yet again with sadness in her voice, and it broke my heart because I’ve heard her cry so many more tears than she deserves to cry. She told me she worried about leaving this lifetime without ever knowing the feeling of having been loved, and in love.

Underneath the veneer of my somewhat naïve Libra hopefulness and Capricorn rising self-assuredness, there lived the intimate connection of knowing when you can’t trust another woman’s intentions.

Later that evening I wrote a letter to her which I never sent. I wrote about Oshun, one of the African goddesses, or “Orisha,” that I worship. Oshun, the mother of sweet waters, love, prosperity and fertility, is the most beautiful and radiant woman in all the pantheon with a golden personality, an enchanting dance and an enormous heart.

“I am the image of the Oshun who dances and laughs like a hyena,” I wrote, “And you are the Oshun who dances and weeps, the one who is always looking and longing for the love she deserves, the one who cries because her world is not nearly as beautiful as it should be.”

I told her, “I want you to focus on loving yourself harder than you ever have. Before I could receive the type of love I needed, I had to get to a place of loving myself more than I had ever imagined I could. You gotta take this time to love you and only you so you can heal and be full enough for the sort of love you deserve to receive.”

And as I wrote that letter I never sent, I hugged myself, feeling all the love she’d filled my life with, and understanding it as the foundation of the love I now know for myself.

***

Four Sundays before, when you went to visit your ex-girlfriend of four years, I didn’t put up a fight because perhaps deep in the fog of my subconscious I had already accepted the truth of what would happen. She had always been a source of tension between us, a relationship archetype — or at least of the relationship I pattern myself into — the clingy ex who refuses to move on.

But for the first time ever I was not perturbed by this meeting. After a year-and-a-half of your having been separated from her, and too many hours-long conscious uncoupling conversations between you two for me to keep count of, you had promised me it was over. And I looked forward to the day when she would no longer have the power to draw cortisol through my nerves, and you and she could be friends without longing for anything more.

“You have nothing to worry about,” you told me before you left and I believed you.

But underneath the veneer of my somewhat naïve Libra hopefulness and Capricorn rising self-assuredness, there lived the intimate connection of knowing when you can’t trust another woman’s intentions.

I brushed away this intuition, passed it off as unwarranted insecurity and spent hours alone in your apartment trying to match my pitch with Beyoncé’s, singing along to the sexy serenade “Rocket” from her 2013 self-titled album, while you were out until after midnight, making out and dry humping and cumming on her back, which you somehow rationalized as less harmful because it wasn’t “going all the way.”

The weekend before you got caught, you asked me if I wanted to meet her, “She wants to go out with us tonight…She said she really wants to meet you.”

“Huh?” I responded. And you said the look in my eyes was that of someone who could kill you, and then, you deflected your lies by criticizing my anger as excessive.

Later that evening, we saw two cars narrowly avoid a crash, tires screeching, and you acted as if you saw no synchronous correlation to your earlier proposal of a big fun menage a trois, which grew into an argument about our favorite subject. When I told you she still wanted to be with you, on our way home at the end of the night, you pretended as if you had no idea, the same way you pretended not to know what I was talking about when you woke up the night I found out and I asked you what you had to done with her in the back of the van.

The day after the near car crash, Beyoncé and Jay Z release their duo album “EVERYTHING IS LOVE,” under their pseudonym, “The Carters”. The work speaks to the couple’s shared trials, tribulations and successes against the backdrop of nouveau riche opulence.

Over those 20 days of self-inflicted purgatory, you asked me multiple times if I was open to taking her as a third — a selfish and deluded last-ditch effort to prevent yourself from feeling the weight of guilt and the itch of shame, shrouded in a bad joke.

The morning before the night I discovered the truth, finding the evidence while digging through your text messages. At the witching hour of 3 am, she sent you some self-pitying bullshit about releasing, which I knew was more of an attempt to win you back than a commitment to letting you go. I preached to you my tough love sermon on moving on, and forward. And you showed your insensitivity and selfishness yet again asking me, “You sure you don’t wanna just bring her into this thing we got?”

And when you said, “I just don’t want to hurt her,” you really meant you didn’t want to hurt me more than you already had, and what you really didn’t want was have to face the consequences.

***

Four days after an Aries full moon spelled the cosmic demise of my first relationship, the day after my birthday and seven days before our first date, I called my psychic, Lori. She told me the most important part of any relationship is what it teaches you and asked me to write a letter, which I never sent, to an ex, who had always wanted nothing more than for me to write about her and us.

You and she share strange traits. You both were raised by Capricorn fathers who you share tense relationships with. You’re both going gray early. You both find solace in woodworking and experienced an exodus of friends from your lives upon meeting me. Neither of you care much for Beyoncé’s music. Both of your ex-girlfriends seemed to want to adhere harder once I entered your lives. And you both felt comfortable slipping into sin with these ex-girlfriends a few months into your relationships with me, knowing it wouldn’t be enough to break me, the “Strong. Black. Woman.” you had both hoped for, the one who would be tough enough to withstand your faults.

By the time I accepted the truth of your lies, I understood Drake even more when he said, “You know how this shit goes/This is not four years ago.”

“The one rule I made” you said.

“You broke,” I retorted.

The one thing you asked of me, which was to never lie to you about anything that had happened with anyone else, you couldn’t reciprocate.

And I told you, you had done the worst possible thing: ripped open a wound in me that had healed, or so I’d thought. I made you tell me what I meant to you as you shrunk in the driver’s seat of the truck you had first kissed her in.

My Mercury in Scorpio was in full effect, and I enjoyed seeing you waste away, and knowing my words could make you feel small.

I was “the fire of the sun, the give and take of oxygen, the flow of water, and the fruits of earth that give life.” And I understood, in that moment, why you did what you had done, because you are only human. And humans haven’t yet given up their short-sighted impulses to disrespect and destroy the very things which sustain them.

***

After I first watched “Lemonade,” I brought it into the arts workshop I facilitated at the women’s prison three weeks in a row, due to popular demand. An audience of women who had ended up behind bars because of their responses to jilted lovers’ indiscretions; accessories to fraudulent finances and drug dealing and car theft; defenders at all costs who had harbored fugitive suitors; victims to the sort of anger that emerges from ripped-open pre-existing wounds and the sort heartache deep enough to make you try to kill yourself, or someone else. These were ride or die chicks burned in the ashes of far-from-Hollywood myths about quotidian Bonnies and Clydes.

***

It was the summer solstice and we celebrated in a simple ritual with my married friends, writing our intentions down and sending them up in a paper lantern. I snapped into an unexplained anger later in the night as we got ready for sleep.

“You better appreciate me,” I said to you, echoing a warning of which you were well-aware and had heard many times before.

You flipped it, rolled over and sucked your teeth, “You don’t appreciate me.” I sprang to my defense, I told you how beautiful and deserving and good and worthy you were and that, “I hope you can one day learn to love yourself.” And I cradled you until you pushed me away, saying it was too hot, but meaning that you knew you didn’t deserve my gestures of affection because you lay chained in guilt, using every insecurity you could muster to make what you had done feel ok to yourself.

Before we went to sleep and before I woke up to the nightmare from which I watched the next morning’s sunrise with you, I asked you, “What did you write on the paper lantern?”

“I wished for a long and happy marriage with you, and kids.”

The morning after the fallout of your mess, my friend calls me to talk through their confusing recent break up.

“It’s like just last month we were talking about having kids… and now this,” she said.

“You know,” I said, taking a breath to process what had just happened to me earlier that morning, “the universe is a beautiful thing, but it can be a tricky motherfucker sometimes. When you put those sorts of intentions out there, and you’re open to it, the universe will test you. If you had kids this would be ten thousand times worse. So, if that is truly your intention for the future, you have to work through the muck of the present to prove you are committed to and capable of getting there.”

I had brushed aside my impulse to look through your phone as neurosis, and forced myself asleep. When I woke up at 3:45 am, the tea light candle I had lit on my ancestral altar was still burning. I remembered a meme I had seen the day before while scrolling through Facebook, and the unexplainable urge I had felt to send it to you:

Then I saw the message from her, second in your text list, right under one you had sent to me, and I felt my heart bursting. My initial numbness unraveled to ticking rage, as my Mars in Scorpio would have it, and I looked at you and thought over the past 20 days and wanted to kill you.

You woke up at 4:44, a synchronous occurrence, the hour Jay Z claims to have woken up in revelation and penned his 13th album and musical repentance, “4:44.”

***

I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about the moments just after you woke up. What you said and felt, how and where you looked.

In a moment of revelation, I ask myself why every serious or semi-serious partner I’d ever had had cheated on me.

Would it be that all people regardless of gender, age, background, class or sexual orientation have the ability to descend into the selfishness of philandering? Or that non-monogamy is an inevitable return to the truest human nature? Or that people just like fucking with me? Perhaps, it’s some imperfect alchemy of one or all of these reasons.

And it is quite possible that why it happened has everything to do with you and nothing to do with me.

But if this has happened to me in literally every relationship I’ve ever had for more than two weeks, why was I still so afraid of it?

I wonder how much of that initial Lemonade premonition was intuition? How much of it had been divine intervention, a manifestation of my biggest fears, crystalized into one selfish act over and over again to present me with the possibility to face my fears head on; to conquer them; and to soar far above them.

***

You made excuses — said you did it because your life was in chaos and her Scorpio sun sign eyes know how to pull your Scorpio rising back into the toxicity of what you two had. When you can’t deal with my explosive anger, I say, “Too fucking bad,” because my Scorpio Mars placement knows how to turn me into a powder keg that could destroy anything or anyone in a moment’s breath, and my politicized Black woman anger makes me feel like I’ll kill you and her both, and bury you side-by-side in the same plot in the cemetery. I guess the new thing to do is use astrology as an excuse for the parts of ourselves we don’t want to change.

I saw the message from her, second in your text list, right under one you had sent to me, and I felt my heart bursting. My initial numbness unraveled to ticking rage.

When I kicked you out of my bed at midnight the next day, I asked you why your Cancer sun couldn’t think of the pain you’d cause my Cancer moon with enough time to prevent it and you blamed it on not knowing what you wanted and not wanting to feel trapped in something real.

You wrote to me at 3:45 a.m., long after I was asleep. You told me you were haunted by your actions and that you would repent by any means necessary and asked if, in time, I could ever forgive you.

As much as I know our astrological predispositions are never an appropriate excuse and we always have free will in our actions and responses, I also know that resentment is a powerful spell which binds you to the object of your disdain, and in the words of Beyoncé on “LOVEHAPPY,” the concluding track of “EVERYTHING IS LOVE,” and my personal favorite: “Nightmares only last a night.” Release.

In life, we always have the choice to let ourselves fall back into the comfort of sameness — the same old actions and responses and resentments we’ve carried this far — or we can move a little closer to freedom by trying something new and letting go. I could have been mad at you and rightfully stayed mad about it and stopped believing in you or anything you had to offer me. But I think that would have been to comfortable to make me a better version of myself.

I keep an altar to Oshun next to my bed, a breathing tribute to the Mami Wata goddess who weeps because she knows life is nowhere near as beautiful as it could be, and that love is the most bittersweet thing in this world, and I admire Libra rising, Scorpio moon Beyoncé most when she’s draped in gold.

And you know girls love Beyoncé and I take my cues from goddesses, knowing that, as Beyonce sings, “Nothing real can be threatened,” and “I believe you can change.”

So, with a teary inhale, I tell you that “we’re gonna heal, we’re gonna start again.”

Love.

* * *

Cherise Morris is a Detroit-based writer and spiritualist. Her essays have previously appeared in The Feminist Wire, Bustle, Fourth Genre, and The Iowa Review.

Editor: Sari Botton

Michael Jackson had special relationships with Ebony and Jet. Since their beginnings, the publications, founded by John H. Johnson in Chicago in 1945 and 1951, covered the lives of Black celebrities, professionals, and everyday people alongside a strong political undercurrent.

Jet was a weekly digest memorable to me for the Beauty of the Week centerfolds my uncles and cousins scattered around their homes and the Black music charts printed at the back of each issue. It’s perhaps best known for photographs of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, published in 1955.

The lifestyle monthly Ebony was patterned after Life and Look. In its January 1960 issue, a remarkable story written by William B. Davis profiled several Black Americans living in Russia in the midst of the Cold War, asking, “Who are the Negroes in Russia? How did they get there? How are they treated? Are they really free?” A story on Miles Davis from December 1982 was mostly about his recovery from a stroke, but he also critiqued Rolling Stone. “I like that magazine,” he said to Ebony, “but the last time I saw it, it had all white guys in it. How about Kool and the Gang? Earth, Wind, and Fire? They should write more about people like that.”

Throughout Michael’s 40 years in show business, Ebony published stories such as “The Michael Jackson Nobody Knows,” on important career milestones. In an interview from 1987, about the release of Bad, he utters a simple but heavy sentence: “I don’t remember not performing.” These stories humanize Michael and try to turn the narrative away from the spectacle and speculation growing around him. The coverage would become strategic when he faced allegations of sexual misconduct with minors. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about discovering this phenomenon in his essay “Michael”:

It’s fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years. I confess myself disoriented by them, as a white person. During whole stretches of years when the big media were reporting endlessly on his bizarreness and reclusiveness, he was every so often granting these intimate and illuminating sit-downs to those magazines, never forgetting to remind them that he trusted only them, would speak only to them. The articles make me realize that about the only Michael Jackson I’ve ever known, personality-wise, is a Michael Jackson who’s defending himself against white people who are passive-aggressively accusing him of child molestation. He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different.

What a pleasure to find him listening to early ‘writing version demos of his own compositions and saying, ‘Listen to that, that’s at home, Janet, Randy, me…You’re hearing four basses on there…’

* * *

Since Beyoncé’s fourth Vogue cover was announced, I’ve been thinking about how the Black press has always been where Black artists could have their work spoken about with integrity. Being Black could be simple matter of fact there, unencumbered by duty of explanation or self-defense. The burden of racism wasn’t the centerpiece or engine of every story. The humanity of subjects was not flattened, defanged, or made into spectacular monstrosity. Beyoncé hasn’t given a traditional magazine interview since 2013, presumably to get around some of these mainstream media tendencies. She has produced an increasingly complex body of visual, sound, and performance art, creating her own candid language. It made sense that the Vogue team would allow her “unprecedented control” of the editorial as reports claimed. The reports also let us know that for the first time in the magazine’s history, a Black photographer, Tyler Mitchell, would shoot its cover.

When the cover was revealed, however, editor-in-chief Anna Wintour told “Business of Fashion” that it was the Vogue team who’d been in control creatively. It had been their idea to initiate such a sea change for the magazine. Wintour, after all, was who’d made André Leon Talley the magazine’s first Black creative director in 1988. Writing about his tenure for the Washington Post, Talley said he “sounded no bullhorn over diversity.” Cover photography had been “entirely in the hands of others.” He takes a somewhat defensive position, but really, he doesn’t need to. Not even one Black photographer captivated the Vogue team enough in more than one hundred years. How could that have been mere oversight?

* * *

In Mitchell’s finest image, Beyoncé is seated in a Southern Gothic tableau, in front of a plain white sheet, wearing a bridal gown and a crown of real flowers. It could be a still from Lemonade. I see the stare of a woman in refusal, though I’m not sure of what. Beyoncé’s artistry and vivacious attention to her own life is pregnant with history and memory — she’s at an apex of a long line of Black women in American entertainment. Dorothy Dandridge, whose singing voice was dubbed over in Carmen Jones. Lena Horne, whose work in musicals was sometimes deleted when the films screened in the South. Lauryn Hill, who disappeared from the spotlight at the height of her fame. The weight of all that is there, softly referenced in the images, directly in the cover story. But the critic Robin Givhan found an opaque, disappointing muteness in the cover image. “Nothing is divulged,” she wrote.

I think a lot about how journalists called Aretha Franklin a difficult person to interview. “Whatever you learn from Aretha when you sit down and talk to her, you’ve got to watch her onstage if you really want to know what she thinks and feels and agonizes about,” Ed Bradley said after speaking with her in 1990. In Respect, biographer David Ritz documented numerous times Franklin arranged interviews with Jet as counterpoint to an unfavorable report in another outlet.

Beyoncé’s Vogue photos are gorgeous, but I wonder what the editorial would have looked like if she’d truly trusted the publication’s creative team to support her. There’s still much to be desired in the way Black subjects, even the most distinguished and well-known, are portrayed in the mainstream. I’m fatigued by the hollow kind of diversity that tokenizes and the endless stories about racism and racial trauma. If I never again hear about how a Black or brown person has “taught” a white person something of moral value, I’d be pleased. In the not-so-distant past, glossies like Ebony, Jet, Vibe, The Source, and weekly papers like the Michigan Chronicle, and the Chicago Defender existed all at once. They had cachet and resources, and, importantly, a cauldron of Black editors and photographers and stylists who’d come up through the ranks. They created generative, textured counterpoints to mainstream narratives, and their teams were personally and institutionally invested in the growth, preservation, and rigorous interpretation of Black culture.

For better and for worse, and on the whole, they were trusted — to not denigrate, degrade, diminish, or exclude their subjects. To light them beautifully, to see, hear, and listen.

Ebony, Vibe, Essence and many local newspapers such as the Michigan Chronicle, the Chicago Defender, the St. Louis American and the Tri-State Defender are still publishing. Much of the archives of Ebony, Jet, and Negro Digest are available digitally via Google Books. The Obsidian Collection is digitizing the archive of many legacy Black newspapers. Digital-first publications such as CASSIUS, Okayplayer, the Grio, and the Root do excellent work. But the media landscape has contracted and consolidated. Some Black outlets have shut down. Many of those that remain are unable to publish with the cadence they once did. Much Black talent is scattered about. Diversity is universally in, at least in this moment. It has become a business imperative for mainstream publications. That’s a win and a progression. But it has come with a cost.

When Beyoncé strolled onto Coachella’s desert stage like a drum major on the night of April 16, no one was prepared for the spectacle that was to come. There was, of course, the sheer magnitude of it: She wore a cape and crown of painstaking detail, bedazzled by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain, referencing the ageless black regality of Nefertiti and Michael Jackson. Dozens of monochromatically clad dancers joined Bey, along with a drumline with sousaphone and trombone players. It was an ocean of sound and color against the backdrop of bleachers. “‘Let’s do a homecoming,” she reportedly told her choreographers in early rehearsals.

Perhaps we should’ve been ready. Beyoncé, known for rigorous stagecraft, always promises a spectacle. She’s a pop star who sings soul, although she hasn’t ever tried to be earthy or minimalist like Erykah Badu or Jill Scott, two artists whose work I can tell she pays attention to. I’m sure Beyoncé could pull off a full-length, stripped down, acoustic album if she wanted, but she’s always seemed willfully extra. Her sound is emotive, melismatic, acrobatic, and her visuals are similarly bombastic — a lot of hair, plenty of ass and sweat, and more than a few wardrobe changes.

Yet some of my favorite moments of her career are when she’s focused on fundamentals. Keeping the beat on her lap while performing “Halo” at a children’s hospital, ad-libbing on Frank Ocean’s “Pink and White,” harmonizing on the relaxed, minor-note groove of Destiny’s Child deep cuts like “Get on the Bus,” and “Confessions”. You notice her ear for complex harmonies, the strength of her lower register, the sense of rhythm that makes the delivery of her hooks sticky, and the staccato of her cadences — along with everything else she’s capable of, she’s also more than competent as a rapper.

What I loved most about Bey at Coachella was how her performance drew out elements that have been important in her art for the past 20 years and took them to their logical conclusion — or rather, to their true beginning. She’s long had a brassiness in her voice and she’s always mined black, Southern ways of being for her work. When her sister’s meditative album A Seat at the Table climbed the charts alongside Lemonade in 2016, both of which explicitly pulsed with a brazen black consciousness, Solange told the public not to be surprised. “I’m really proud of my sister and I’m really proud of her record and her work and I’ve always been,” she said to Fader. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s always been an activist from the beginning of her career and she’s always been very, very black.”

If you’re black and from the South, it feels like the culture of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) is in the ether. They are spaces you can’t ignore and wouldn’t want to. Beyoncé was born in Houston and her father graduated from Fisk University. When she was a child in the 1980s and 90s, Spike Lee joints came out almost every other year, and Lee never let us forget that he’d gone to Morehouse, the way Morehouse men are wont to do. The culture of HBCU’s and black Greek life was everywhere: Lee’s 1988 film School Daze and the 1987 TV series A Different World shared similar themes and a few principal cast members, including Jasmine Guy, who was head of the Gamma Ray sorority in the former and iconic B.A.P. Whitley Gilbert in the latter.

That Beyoncé chooses to highlight the specific culture of HBCUs and black Greek life shouldn’t really surprise us, either, and if it does, it feels to me as if we haven’t really been paying attention. A host of black artists have seen black college culture as ripe for the imaginary. At JSTOR Daily, Lavelle Porter reminds us that it was taken up by novelists Ralph Ellison and Nella Larsen at the beginning of the century, and later, by the creators of films and shows like Drumline, Stomp the Yard, and The Quad. To that list,we could add Janelle Monáe, who depicted HBCU life in her 2013 music video “Electric Lady,” as well as Kanye West, whose mother got degrees from Virginia Union and Atlanta University and was the head of the English department at Chicago State for six years.

Growing up, my older sister ran a small business selling Afrocentric gifts and black Greek paraphernalia at Classic ballgames and other events throughout the South. This was the early 90s, when Kenté cloth and Malcolm X fitted caps and medallions were everywhere. One of the T-shirts in our inventory read “The Blacker the College, the Sweeter the Knowledge,” a riff on an old saying about blackness and fecund soulfulness. At a well-attended event at Memphis’ Cook Convention Center, a customer looked me in the eyes and said she knew the future was secure since I’d been such an eloquent and competent salesperson for a fifth grader.

My sophomore year of high school, I visited a few Southern and East coast colleges, both HBCUs and PWIs, on a tour bus with a church group. Spelman felt like home in a way that I didn’t know a place of learning could. Missy Elliot videos played in a student center, women who looked and sounded like people I loved carried full backpacks, answered our questions. When we got to Howard, we were giddy. It was a Friday afternoon in the late spring, and we spent a long time out on the green, buzzing Yard.

Part of the reason I didn’t go to an HBCU was that I was so familiar with them. Now, I wonder what I could have been had I let myself bask in that kind of affirmation for a little bit longer. Nonetheless, I was pretty sure that who I was — a nerdy, bespectacled daughter of a poor-to-working class single mother, wouldn’t easily fit in at one those campuses.

My experiences with wealthier black families in Memphis — and watching Bill Cosby’s shows — made it clear that I needed to aspire to a pristine, black middle-class ideal. I think Cosby’s crimes have given us an opportunity to think about the limits of some of our sacred black spaces, how the pressure to be respectable can force you to abandon or question or edit yourself if you’re poor, or queer, or anything else. By associating herself with HBCUs, Beyoncé challenges those mores with her self-avowed feminist, queer-loving and blatantly sexual art. She helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.

That she chose to share this at Coachella, with its largely wealthy, white audience, wasn’t exactly a disruption. I truly believe that her performance placed HBCUs and black Greek culture at the center of American life, and that’s where they belong. Today, there are 102 HBCUs, a mix of private and public institutions. Most have some relationship with federal or state funding, and none have endowments like those of the oldest, private universities in the northeast, many of which are uncovering their ties to slavery.  The share of black college students enrolled in HBCUs has declined in recent years, but the schools do more than their share of the work — enrolling about 9 percent of the nation’s black undergraduates and graduating about 15 percent of them.

They are also American institutions that have an important relationship with our nation’s long march towards democracy. According to W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1935 essay Black Reconstruction:

The first great mass movement for public education at the expense of the state, in the South, came from Negroes. Many leaders before the war had advocated general education, but few had been listened to. Schools for indigents and paupers were supported, here and there, and more or less spasmodically. Some states had elaborate plans, but they were not carried out. Public education for all at public expense, was, in the South, a Negro idea.

Before this mass movement, the South’s leadership did not believe in the “educability of the poor,” and much of the white laboring class in the region saw no need for it, mired as they were in the plantation system’s feudalism. State by state, Reconstruction governments set up tax-based schools that would be open to all. There was resistance to nearly all of this — to the idea of blacks becoming educated, to whites teaching blacks, to the black and white students sharing facilities. As a compromise, secondary schools and colleges were opened specifically to train black teachers. Fisk University opened in 1866, and Howard University was founded in 1867, partly funded by the Freedman’s Bureau. Du Bois said these institutions “became the centers of a training in leadership and ideals for the whole Negro race, and the only fine and natural field of contact between white and black culture.”

A few studies have shown that throughout the world, compulsory education increases voter participation, and increases in education predict social engagement in the sort of groups and organizations that do critical grassroots work. The push for education on the part of emancipated blacks, then, can be considered a driving force in the ever-widening democratization of American life.

Beyoncé’s Coachella sets were a correction to the erasure and historical amnesia that make us feel like she could possibly disrupt something that her forebears had such a heavy hand in creating.

For further reading:

• What Does Bill Cosby’s Problematic Legacy Mean for Black Colleges, Lavelle Porter, JSTOR Daily
• Wake Up! It’s the 30^th Anniversary of Spike Lee’s School Daze, Kelley Carter, The Undefeated
• Representing HBCUs: Spike Lee’s “School Daze” at 30, Lavelle Porter, Black Perspectives
• Under Trump, a Hard Test for Howard University, Jelani Cobb, The New Yorker
• My Father And I Both Chose HBCUs, But Not For The Same Reason, Frederick McKindra, Buzzfeed
• March to the Joyous, Raucous Beat of the Sonic Boom of the South, Richard Grant and Zack Arias, Smithsonian
• At Fisk University, A Tradition of Spirituals, Jeff Bossert, NPR
• Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, Craig Steven Wilder, NPR
• 272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown: What Does it Owe Their Descendants? Rachel L. Swarns, The New York Times

FULL STOP: Today, we’re flooded with stories via the internet — on personal Tumblrs, Facebook and Twitter statuses, the abundance of magazines and newspapers that make their content free online. With so many narratives all around us, why do we still read (and pay for) novels?

“Oh I’m fairly certain we… don’t any more. We do a little I guess! We all paid for Beyoncé’s album though didn’t we, how do you like that. People will pay for a book for a few reasons:

“• The big books get bought because they’re guaranteed feel-good weepers. (Not a contradiction; see also Upworthy, dogs greeting homecoming veterans, and babies.)

“• The littler books get bought for a few reasons, besides the ‘oh I have heard good things from a trusted purveyor of opinions and I wish to indulge in this book’: aspirational purchasing (related to aspirational sharing), which means ‘I want to be the kind of person who buys this book,’ which is less obnoxious than ‘I want to be seen reading this book’ which is less bad than ‘I want to tell people I’m reading this book.’ I mean not that I haven’t done all those things, so you know. Then there are identity reasons; Tao Lin is bought by a cadre of young smart people who want to be in some sort of Smart Kids scene. And then there’s the good old capitalist market-maker: exclusivity. You can’t get it anyhow anyway? Then you’ll buy it.”

–The Awl co-founder Choire Sicha, in an interview with Full Stop, on the future of books, reading and the internet. Read more from The Awl in the Longreads Archive.

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Photo: ch-villa, Flickr

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