Chapter 2 The sky over Amsterdam

Chapter Two: The Sky Over Amsterdam

The sky in Amsterdam felt impossibly wide. Kemi had grown up with heavy skies-thick with heat, dust, the unsaid, and the sacred. But here, above the canals and tilted houses, the sky stretched open like it had nothing to hide. She stood beneath it on her third morning in the city, coffee in one hand, paint-stained fingers clutching her sketchpad in the other, watching bicycles stream past like currents in a river. No one looked twice at her. No one whispered. And for the first time in years, she wasn't waiting to flinch. Her residency apartment was small but warm, tucked above a gallery with wide windows that caught the morning light. She had painted through jet lag, through homesickness, through the ache of leaving Esi. She had painted the shape of Esi's shoulder, the crease at the corner of her mouth, the way her body curled when she slept. And she had painted herself-freer, louder, unbound. Still, the silence between them hurt. Esi hadn't replied to her last message. The one with the photo. The one that said, Come if you're ready to breathe. Maybe she wasn't. At the gallery, Kemi stood in front of one of her newer pieces-a burst of color shaped like two women in shadow, forehead to forehead, surrounded by yellow. A Dutch curator with kind eyes had asked her what it was called. "'Unspoken,'" she'd replied. "Is it about longing?" "No," she had said. "It's about fear." Later that night, Kemi sat cross-legged on the floor, laptop open, screen glowing. She opened a blank email, fingers hovering over the keys. Esi, The world here doesn't stare. It doesn't ask questions with knives behind their teeth. No one calls us names. I kissed someone's cheek in public yesterday-just a friend-and I didn't even have to look over my shoulder. I think you'd like it here. I think maybe you'd like yourself more here. I'm not asking you to change who you are. I just want you to see who you could be-if you let yourself. I miss you. Not just your presence. I miss the version of you that I only ever saw in the dark. The one who laughed without caution. Come. Or write. Or tell me to stop writing. Just... something. Love, Kemi She hit send before she could stop herself. Esi read the email on a Sunday morning, sitting alone at her mother's kitchen table. The power had gone out again. The ceiling fan was still, and the neighborhood rooster crowed far too late. Her mother, busy humming a hymn while peeling yams, didn't notice the way Esi's hand trembled. Kemi's words settled into her chest like a stone. She thought of that last kiss, full of sunlight and defiance. Thought of how her own reflection had begun to look like someone else's life. And thought, for the first time, not of what she'd lose if she left, but what she might find. That evening, Esi opened her laptop, heart hammering. Subject: Unspoken I still dream about your paintings. I think I finally understand what you meant by breathing. She didn't type more. Not yet. But she hit send. It was a beginning.