The forces of my desires talked to me – they blew thoughts like lava, as if, in my mind, we could only make love when we had become specks of ashes scattered in the wind, beyond recognition in form or shape. I paced up and down, lost, until I was snapped back from my world by the kettle’s whistle. I brought the tea to the dining room table with a plate of biscuits. I sat and observed Bina-Balozi as he listened to Diana without interruption. Thoughts fermented in my mind during his long silence, and I held on to many of them long after he’d left and I’d returned to my room. The mere sight of him brought up so many questions. How could I have feelings about him and Anne, two different people, at the same time, with the same intensity? My room turned into a laboratory where I experimented with my desires. In the absence of a Home Office decision, of school, education or family, sex loomed large in my life,and everything else faded into the night. If my passion for men’s asses is a condition I suffer from, then it must be called reciprocity: the need to enter and see inside my male lover in the way they could. I yearned for every part of their body to be accessible to the variations of my desires in the way I was to them. But it could also be a mere addiction to an anus that I first discovered when I was with Alem in that open-roofed shower, when I washed his body and took the dust off his skin to reveal a gateway between his cheeks that was more than a hole – that the more I pressed with my tongue through his O, the more it added intricacy to my palates. In those days, while waiting for the Home Office to decide on my application, and while living in a room bordered by a train line on one side and the man in the first-floor window on the other, every dark tunnel had the promise of light at its end. O Bina-B. I remember that moment in Fitzroy Square after I had finished topping him and said to him, Fuck me now. The weather oscillated between wet and warm, windy and calm. But my obsession was the weather I was creating inside Bina-B. As I glimpsed the lush spring I had brought to his body in that rainy night, I thought that if I could reinvent weather, I could also reinvent love. The lights drifted on the backs of poets’ silhouettes strolling on the deserted streets of Fitzroy Square in the way BB floated around my heart. I don’t remember if I or Bina-B had said it, but one of us muttered: There’s a certain kind of loneliness to falling in love. O. B.B. I want you to fuck me now. As soon as these words left my lips, he bowed his head. When even the idea of fucking me, which many had taken for granted, made him hesitate, satisfaction invaded me. That was the world I wanted to be part of, a world where reciprocity is the key to pleasure, a world where the certainty we were born into is replaced by one constantly altering according to our changing feelings and ideas, a world where the only certitude is to experience freely as we go along. BB held my hand. Our bodies glued, our eyes locked. It was as if he’d pinned me against the raging sky: lightning flashed through my skin, and as I trembled, I hunted the black panthers in his eyes. A rainbow appeared in the clouds of his breath. He parted my legs. There was no pushing, no thrusting. He arrived inside me like a sensitive visitor who takes off their shoes and all their expectations and leaves them by the door. Once he was inside me, he didn’t move. His mouth was as silent as his penis. He leant towards me. On our breaths sailed out the history of violence, wars against the colonisers, civil wars, the alien religions, the definitions, the traumas and migrations. Silence moved in our veins, floating under our pores as if we had smuggled our Nile to this spring night, fertilising our imaginations. The weight was in his chest, filled with stories that he pressed against mine. I never felt anything deeper as he made love to me with the words of a folklore story he recited about humans in the shape of trees hanging from the skyline. Bina-Balozi was what you call a child soldier, although his fights were not to free a country, but himself. He was four when his father carried him on his shoulders to the market of their village. Bina-Balozi lowered his head towards his father that day and said, Daddy, I want to be like my mother when I grow up. The father pulled his son down and smacked him. But this only increased Bina-Balozi’s determination. He watched his mother as she worked various jobs in the village and at home, while his father drank and gambled her money away. Bina-Balozi copied her in every single way possible: how she wended through the narrow streets of her village and life, how she listened to the silence around her, how she smiled, laughed and cooked, and how her face twitched and itched. The way she walked, throwing her hips about, found its way to my lap. Oh, Bina-B. When Bina-Balozi turned nine, people noticed the similarities between him and his mother. He was as tall and thin as her. A time came when teenage Bina-Balozi turned himself into an identical twin of his mother, as he had always wanted. From Bina-Balozi, I sharpened my belief that we can rebirth ourselves if we have an imagination. Imaginations are genderless wombs.

***

Order the book here.

Excerpt from THE SEERS published by Prototype Publishing. Copyright © 2024 by Sulaiman Addonia.