A Missouri afternoon hummed with barbecue,
Kansas City spilling jazz from every doorway.
We walked the brick-lined streets,
while our conference badges swing like pendulums –
flimsy, plastic reminders of the rooms of thinkers
we had just left behind.
The panels spoke of method, of theory,
while others made absolutely no sense at all.
We walked around the city of fountains,
as the café windows mirrored our laughter.
The cold sweetness dissolving
like the hours we had carried alone.
But we were speaking of everything else:
the lives we’d lived before conference proposals,
the poems tucked in between our dissertation notes,
the drafts of creative writing we abandoned
for so long
that now have become afterthoughts.
You quoted hooks.
I murmured Lorde.
And the city slid past us
like italicised thoughts in forward motion.
Two women,
writers, thinkers,
makers who had come late to the fire
and found out that it was still burning for us.
I tasted the sugar.
Did you?
We handed the spoon back and forth.
You spoke of writing together,
of work we might build between us,
Like the pages of passages we read in class.
I believed in that creation, too, in you,
even though I did not see the path beginning to narrow between us.
As the sun went down,
Kansas City was getting ready to sleep all around us.
And still, our sentences wanted to walk further.
I was always, already writing,
finding a new sense of agency and autonomy
in this new scholarly identity.
And somehow, you seemed to recognise me immediately there.
One white spoon
being passed back and forth,
as the ice cream sloped down the cup.
We passed storefronts and landmarks
while the streets widened around us.
Each spoonful was a maybe,
or maybe it was that I was too open,
and kind, and giving.
The borders of friendship were stretched
and confused and contorted
over the years in many ways.
Perhaps, you only saw
what my hope and dreams
could offer you.
Did you forget
how close you leaned in and smiled
that made collaboration feel like shelter?
Do you remember how you asked me
questions that couldn’t be explained anyway?
– I carried that knowledge quietly,
the essays, projects, and writing almosts
that disappeared before the real work began.
Over and over again, you withdrew
without explanation,
leaving silence, and doubt, and shame
where you made me believe
your certainty had once been.
It’s dangerous to tug at
the promise of mutual becoming
knowing the history that hung over us.
You returned only when it suited you,
with language soft enough to bend
and make me doubt the distance.
How I would naively cave, each time,
feeling ashamed and guilty for how I’d react
leaving me with questions and
unanswered texts where your intentions wavered constantly
beneath conversation and camaraderie,
like a game of reading between the lines.
I tried to be a good feminist,
a good friend.
But I mistook inconsistency for complexity,
evasion for caution.
I made myself believe that perhaps I asked for too much.
I’ve been ghosted before,
But because I had been so vulnerable
and made mistakes,
I searched our past and present conversations for proof.
Maybe there was a sentence I misread?
Maybe I overapologised for something I said?
Maybe I should be more cautious
to share intellectual space
with someone who claims to be fluent in liberation,
when every text
became an unspoken offence,
and silence, was your way to control.
I’ve carried shame for the both of us.
I’ve rehearsed apologies and assumptions,
I’ve questioned my actions and boundaries.
As I’ve learned, professional kinship
and the belief that I was being seen
came at much too high
a cost.
What kind of feminist can read and cite women
who have found the violences of rhetoric,
while still making another woman
feel that kindness was
a weakness
and trying too hard was something that deserved
to be punished and forgotten.
So, I guess I want to say “thank you”
for letting me hold that space alone.
Thank you for allowing me to feel foolish,
until I really understood
that tenderness was something earned,
that I did not have to burn others
just to prove to myself I was something.
Thank you for letting me find and walk
to the safe edges of this story.
I’ve learned that not all lines need to be read aloud. I will always be grateful for the choice,
for the moment that I walked away from you
in that hotel elevator. – We shared an ice cream spoon, once.
I had just gotten my haircut, super short,
even though I was told not to.
That my impulsive decisions are usually
always dangerous and full of regret.
Shame, as it turns out,
was never mine to keep.
Sometimes, I still walk beside that memory,
just to remind myself I know how to see my own way.
And I know now
that the harder way out
the way that took more for me to sort out
was the one that led me back to myself.
