3youni, won’t they wish they heard this song
In 2019, I was severely misusing pills and, trapped in utter delusion, believed I had fallen in love with the spirit of a young woman who had passed away in 2016. We loved one another for two years, in all of the normalities of typical human affection. I could hear her voice in my mind, the distinction of its tone. She called me Nina, and I called her 3youni (ai-YOON-ee), which is an Arabic term of endearment for “my eyes,” as I was obviously never able to physically see her. When she slowly vanished from my world in 2020, I felt a warring combination of profound heartache and idiocy for having thought our love existed. The epigraph beneath this poem’s title is a blessed reminder from a dear friend—one that does not need explanation. I hope you will read this poem and then wildly dance in your bedroom with the one whom you treasure most—regardless of the physical forms they take.
Image description: An Afro-Arab woman wearing glasses and a head wrap is kneeling in front of a blurred-out gravestone holding flowers.
3youni, won’t they wish they heard this song
“It doesn’t matter that she wasn’t real, because she was real to you.”—Claus Lucas Lopez
At the start of the drum-pops and gulf
of guitars and keyboards
emerges a lady’s voice belting
Love me, love me, love
me, love me. 3youni rises
from her headquarters in the far
corner of my bed—
where she has historically witnessed
my morning wardrobe fittings
or sat like a silent furnace amidst the aftermath
of a squabble—and, now centered
solitarily in my room, she begins to dance
(this, she tells me, as I lack the second
sight to watch her antics). She flits and sways, yet
through my earthen eyes
I see only the other side of the room:
a twosome of ankle boots near the closet,
the bookshelves upon which I’d arranged novels
that I’m too jealous
to love, and the large dresser topped
with unthreading floral cloth. I stare
at 3youni or, where I presume
3youni is jumping about, and with a tense
squint I probe the air between myself and
that far wall until I’m nearly heartsick with defeat,
but I remind myself,
One day, one day you will see her, and suddenly
I think it’s very funny that this is the song
that, quite literally, moves 3youni; not so much
because of what it is, but because of what I was
when I first heard it:
the braless centerpiece
of a floor mattress in a Brooklyn apartment
beside a pair of subway tracks. A boy, planting into me
every vying thrust until he shed, finally,
what remained of him unto my chest:
his was more self-praise
than offering. But I am good
at discarding my hunger, which is why
when I hear 3youni urging me to dance
with her there (wherever “there”
might be), I politely decline and prepare
to busy myself with some hollow distraction.
Because it’s no secret that I dance
as expertly as I convince the world
of something wondrous.
I cross my arms on my bed to hide my body’s
buzzed flickering, a yearning
that I refuse to be compromised by music,
but then I hear her ask, You aren’t going
to join me? which, I guess, means
I should—I really should.
So at last I hoist
myself up and to the center of the room,
where 3youni bounces somewhere
beside me, maybe trying to hold my folded
hands or spin the starch out of me,
like any lover would,
and as I feel the chills of her, I coax
my shoulders into a rhythmic, shabby
series of bumps, and then I persuade
my legs into step, whose conviction looks more
like jogging in place than anything else,
and I toss my hands above me, flap them until
they vaguely resemble those leaflets thrown
from rooftops. And, here, by some remarkable
wisdom I won’t dare query, I know
she is pressing her forehead to mine,
and despite my inability to feel
such things, I know she does this, I know
it, and the room remains gravid
with guitars and keyboards
and the singer, and my bones
floundering so wildly
that if they weren’t clamped by tendon
they’d have flung to the mercy of
stars. I champion the baffled pistons of my legs, jive
like a birdcage being tossed about
the walls, I
jump and I jump and I
jump. In my mind emerges 3youni’s
laughter, a warm varnish
that soon has me jouncing
and singing along, Love me, love me, love me,
Love me.
3youni, I wrote this for you
because of them:
those with bodies like mine,
who cannot see those with bodies like yours—
your mystic post-bloom of death—and so they deem
your every inch impossible. 3youni, they whisper
amongst themselves that my heart must be a dungeon
so dark, full of dusty bookends
and loose paperclips; stuff intended for
coupling, but now seeking purpose
amidst the dinge. 3youni, I am so tired
of begging them to believe. My pleas
always stick to my tongue
like a mouthful of cotton, and then graze
my gums like gravel. No matter
how tightly I braid you, they keep
undoing you. 3youni, I don’t know
why it got so hard.
You have seen me cry, because despondence is the lesson
that we must learn forever, but so, I think,
is being loved. 3youni,
I still remember that time
in the cemetery, when we were sprawled together
across the grass before your big marble headstone,
laid there as if we had awoken on a morning that asked
nothing of us, our lifetimes rich but so, so different
from each other’s. And I saw the thorny halo
of vultures circling ominously above us,
and for a minute I could not speak, so I
looked beside me and, as expected, saw nothing.
But your words arrived to me as softly
as soft can soften:
“Nina, haven’t you learned yet,
that the only love
like ours
is ours.”
-jeannine