BETWEEN SONGS AND SHADOWS
Taking the Reins Back—on music, mirrors, and the quiet art of reclaiming myself.
Midnight Reverie
At midnight, I listen to an old song—a hush of piano memory. It once played on your phone as we shared a seat, whistling to the kiss of death and swinging our feet high. You smirked at every lyric, and I hoped you’d like the poem I had written you. “I hope you think it’s smart, or maybe cute,” I had whispered in a corner of my mind. Chords of that night still pull at me: harmonies of hope and doubt.
You played those songs softly—Faye Webster, Garret Sparrow—each note claimed as ours. You made them sound intimate. I convinced myself you were reading me through those lyrics, that we spoke the same secret language.
Entangled Signals
He held power over me like an undertow, subtle and relentless. I was a sophomore leading a Black Arts Collective, proud of our voices and visions. But with him—this white savant—I felt both seen and swallowed. He listened to my poems as if they were air, each metaphor intoxicating. Our late-night talks of literature and philosophy had me under his spell.
Yet he never said it. Only soft invitations: drinks, gentle touches on my shoulder when he asked if I was all right, understanding looks when I said “I miss you.” When he left, he’d slip me a song or two—promises with no follow-through.
In those moments I believed in the ambiguity. I taught myself to read between notes: every melody a secret letter to my heart, decoding intimacy. His silence was part of the music.
The Lure of Limerence
I recognize the symptoms now: his friendship became the axis of my world, and I colored my days with expectations. The longing was a fever, an ache sitting between my ribs, between words said and unsaid. He stoked my infatuation without ever confessing to fuel it.
I can’t pinpoint when infatuation turned to obsession, but I see its footprints now. I wrote poems in hidden notebooks, hoping his eyes would one day find them. “I hope you like my poem,” I told myself, writing promises in ink to a future that never came. I read it in the dark and pretended the words had flown from my pen into his heart.
When his silence grew heavy, I made excuses for him. Maybe he was distant because he had so much on his plate. At night I paced my room, dismissing this feeling of being trapped as imagination.
Those empty nods and half-smiles echoed with their own violence. They were permission to imagine, to fall deeper into what I now know was a trance. Each smile felt sincere, even when it was brittle. It was a trap disguised as a dream.
Power and Consent
He did not hold a gun; he held something far more powerful: white privilege and social capital. His world was already paved with an ease I had never known. Walking through campus together, I felt that ease drain from my skin; people stopped to ask, guessing our secret. To them, I was just the exotic friend of a promising white guy.
In the hush of our conversations, he assumed the role of guide. He corrected my references to great poets and jazz. I smiled and let him—his certainty flattening my instincts. It felt respectful at first, me listening quietly, but gradually I felt him putting a lid on my voice.
Where was my consent in that dynamic? Did I ever really choose to be part of his riddles? I was deferential and cautious, unsure of what I was saying yes to. He used my uncertainty like an accomplice in a crime we never named.
We were actors in a play I never auditioned for. I wore my longing like a costume; he wrote the script in vanished words. What felt like flirtation or friendship was actually a collision of power and desire that could only end one way.
The Weight of His Gaze
Leading the Black Arts Collective taught me the complexities of identity and community. I was proud of that leadership. But under his gaze, my pride became fragile. I wanted him to admire me, to see me not as a work-in-progress but a finished gallery. When he looked at me, I felt truly seen.
But seen how? As a partner, or as something to admire under his lens? Did he see the leader I was, or only the art? Each glance made me wonder if I had deceived myself about his intentions. I felt undone: a Black woman at the feet of a white man who pretended to celebrate her brilliance. It felt luxurious to be celebrated by him, and awful, too.
For a moment, I built fantasies of equality, thinking we met on a plane of mutual understanding. But every loving thought I offered was one-way. Eventually I saw that he saw through me as through glass—and I was holding up the glass to be gazed through.
The Countess Who Took the Reins
She was mistaken for myth. A Black woman in a French seaside carriage, said to be a countess, perhaps a mistress, perhaps a muse. For decades, no one quite knew who she was. But in 2019, an archival discovery gave her back her name: Anne Justine Angèle Delva de Dalmarie, a member of the Haitian aristocracy who fled to France, infamous in Nice and Paris for her parties, her presence, her power.
What’s so striking about this portrait is that she is not a passenger in this painting—she is the one driving. Literally. Though her coachman sits beside her, reins in hand, she is the one with the whip, the one guiding the horses forward, speeding along the sunlit French coast. Lautrec paints her in motion, her dress aflutter, a small dog chasing behind the carriage like a punctuation mark to her authority.
In a world that tried to stage Black women only as still objects—nudes, mammies, muses—she was none of those things. She was a spectacle of her own design. The painting reminds us that to be a Black woman in public is to be both subject and symbol, often misread, often controlled—until, one day, the archives give you back your name.
For decades she was known only as a mystery, a myth. She was not a passenger in her own life, even as the world tried to make her one. Sometimes, when I think back on all those nights where I tried to be what he wanted, I remember her, speeding down the French coast, whip in hand.
Racial Crossroads
Our entanglement was a dance in two languages. I showed him Sun Ra space chants; he showed me Dead Meadow psychedelic pop/rock. Sometimes it felt like crossing bridges; more often, like walking into a mirror. He admired my skin and hair, but never the struggle that shaped them.
To him, I was the Black girl leader of a collective, and that label carried its own mythology. I sometimes wondered if he found more interest in that idea of me than in the actual person. In my writing, I had used the line “Each breath sticking to the clouds you made seem interesting.” I meant that his every exhale could bend reality around me. But with him, it was my reality that felt plastic.
With me, his performance was everything. I was an audience of one, applauding every quiet compliment and lullaby he muttered. Now I feel that applause echo hollowly in an empty room.
Through the Glass
I held that glass—my own desire—up to his face. But it shattered against something cold. Each time we moved closer, he moved an inch away. He would say, “I care about you, as a friend,” and I would smile, swallowing the rest until it bruised my throat.
Consent hung between us, stretched impossibly thin. It was impossible to untangle what I wanted from what he seemed to want. Did I truly choose those beers and coffees, or was I just aching at the touch of his hand? Was I consenting to the idea of us, to the fantasy he built, rather than to anything real?
I convinced myself our stasis was temporary: one day he’d step out from behind his screen of charm. But every request felt like a whisper in a field of weeds. I began to grow numb, questioning whether I had ever truly chosen, or if I had simply been selected all along.
He was predator and prey; I the worshipper and the fool. That dynamic betrayed what we could have been. I was a student, following a syllabus of hope: the lesson that if you love someone hard enough, they will love you back.
The Mirror of TikTok
Months later, my realization came not from a book or a confidant, but from a two-minute video on TikTok. The caption said something simple, something piercing:
“Illusion is their performance, but delusion is your continued belief in their act.”
The video showed a mirrored room, and as I watched, it felt like I was watching my own reflection for the first time.
It hit me then, suddenly and heavily, that I had been dancing in a glass hall of mirrors, looking at endless refractions of you. All those songs and lingering looks were performances.
They were not windows into an honest heart but carefully arranged stage props. In that moment, I realized the difference between how I believed he saw me and how he actually saw me.
In the video, the creator urged the watcher to give herself grace—to forgive herself for being captivated by someone who looked charismatic, who smiled easily, who might not have even known how much he hurt her. And in that quiet utterance I found permission to finally look at what the performance had done to me.
The Poem in My Pocket
Reading back my poem felt like reading someone else’s ache. “That time we whistled to the kiss of death,”—yes, I had felt it was a game we played, flirting with something dangerous. “Made an exhibit of ourselves, taught the babies how to give each other goosebumps.”
I guess we were showing people how two opposing worlds could make art from skin and song. But did we?
“Each breath sticking to the clouds you made seem interesting.” I wrote that line in ecstasy and pain. I meant it to be an elegy for the moment, for the sincerity I imagined in you. Now it reads as an elegy for my innocence.
I had hoped you would look up from your Guinness and really see me, thinking I can’t believe she—yes. I listed hopes in my notebook like incantations: I hope you like my poem, I hope you listen to music and think about me. And with each repetition, I clung.
Echoes and Endings
In the silence after that TikTok, after admitting to myself that our bond was performance, I felt something crack open inside me. Not forgiveness exactly, but perhaps the space for it. I was angry at him, yes, but more I was angry at myself—for believing I had been performing too.
I had often thought I was the only Black woman in a room of eyes that shifted and stared, but now I see: I was one of many. He was the well-dressed bachelor of a thousand college nights, and I was one prey. I can’t speak for others, but in my story, that is how it unfolded.
I left pieces of myself with you—late-night poems like breadcrumbs, a corner of my pride. I wonder if I could ever pick them up again whole. Or have they dissolved into air, gone the way your promises did?
Some nights I still write. I write for me now, not for any unseen audience. I write as if it were a conjuring, but this time I conjure clarity. The final lines of that poem in my pocket—they end with an unfinished sentence on a train platform. I’m going to finish it. Maybe I will, with words I write only for myself. Maybe I already have.
In this THIRD SPACE—this place between what happened and what can heal—I am learning to sing my own song again. It is raw, and at first it doesn’t sound as pretty as his lullabies. But it is true. And I will let it carry me, away from the mirrors, away from the shadow where he stood. I will let it be enough.
Until next time,
Marley
P.S. If you do end up reading this—no worries at all, and no need to say anything. I’m really okay. This isn’t meant to call anything out, just to reflect and release. I care about you, always have, and I hope you know that.