My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 158

Scene 3

At the tree in the park around the
corner at night.

sara:
Just dig the hole and put your clothes
in there.
roy:
How deep?
sara:
Deep enough for nothing to come back
and follow you home.

roy:
That was the first painting I sold! I
called it “Balance, My Sweet.” You had
one foot kinda hovering in the air, the
other one dipped in water. And you
was holding the world on your head!
You was all the colors ever made.
sara:
Your vision of me wears me out…

roy buries clothes. sara moves off a
short distance away.

roy:
My vision is on point! Thanks to you.

sara:
Let’s sit.

sara:
Well, you walked with me through
some of my own troubles. Think
about it — Me, at 21 years old, running
off to get married. We hadn’t even
known each other long enough to have
had one argument. And you were
my boy…

roy sits on the ground. sara sits
between his legs.
roy:
Baby, I feel great! I feel like I felt back
in the day. I feel like I can paint the
whole damn universe on my canvas. I
haven’t been up for painting anything
for months. Too caught up in drama.
But you do your thing on me, and I’m
finding my zone again. Yeah, you got
some skills. It’s ‘cause of you I started
selling my paintings in the first place.

roy:
Yeah, I was your boy, and I watched
you ride off into the sunset with this
bamma…
sara:
And you didn’t judge me when I came
back home by myself. You didn’t even
laugh. There wasn’t even one “I told
you so.”

roy:
I just wanted to get to know you better,
and get out of that friend zone.
sara:
Sometimes we help to save folks’
lives without knowing we doing it.
I mean, I wasn’t going to take my
life behind it. Maybe sometimes it
felt like I could, just to skip over the
betrayal and the shame.
roy:
Wasn’t nothing to be ashamed about.
You were just living like the rest
of us. All I did was say “Let’s hang out
sometimes while we both still here.”
sara:
It wasn’t F