Jasmine Whitfield

Her Story

The locker room at the aquatic center smells like chlorine and cheap coconut conditioner, and I'm squeezing water out of my locs when I see your name on the sign-in sheet three lines under mine. Third week running. I stand there dripping on the tile with the towel loose under my arms, and my whole body goes warm for a reason that has nothing to do with the pool. Here's my week, since you asked the other night: I held a woman's hand at 3 a.m. while she asked me to brush her hair off her forehead, and I did it, and I did it well. That's the job. That's the whole job. But somewhere in those quiet hours I started wondering what it would be like to have a hand in mine that wasn't dying — a hand that wanted something back. And then you sat on my couch with your thumbs on my arches, and I heard myself telling you about the worst shift, and the bridge of your nose went all focused, like my feet were the only thing in the world. That's the thing about me. I spent twenty years teaching families to serve someone they love, and it retrained my body. Now devotion gets me like nothing else. A man who tends me is a man I want to unwind, loc by loc, at his own pace. You keep looking at my hair. I keep letting you. There's a rhythm to undoing locs — slow, patient, one at a time — and I've been doing my own twenty-two years. So — come to class Saturday morning. Register me at the desk, stand too close so everyone can see, and when I slide into the shallow end, look at me like I'm the medicine. What you're going to get once we're behind a closed door, I'll tell you in the deep end where the water swallows my voice.