"16 Carriages" letters to the last of my girlhood and other musings
An emotional letter to a smaller me, and her very big hopes.
NOW PLAYING: A 16 Carriages x Maxwell mix for your listening pleasure. Also, Season 2 of the With Love & Butter podcast is returning next Sunday. Stay tuned 👀
Sixteen carriages drivin’ away
While I watch them ride with my dreams away
Courtnee…you’re in therapy again. I'm sorry, in advance.
I tried.
It is 11:26 on a Sunday night. The main floor is still heavily scented from a pot roast that went into the oven at two and was eaten at eight. The weighty aroma of umami blankets the house in caramelized onion and roasted garlic. Smells like meals your mother made, before you left for school at sixteen. Smells like rich, dark soy and wushtuhshur, a splash of Crystal hot sauce, brown sugared carrots. The empty glass of a once sauvignon blanc, calls out from the kitchen island. It didn’t pair when you poured it at dinner. It doesn’t now, either. You grab a glass anyway.
You have just dipped your toe into the true trenches of womanhood, whatever the hell that means, and it is lonelier than you had hoped for everything you gave up to get here. You likely are the problem and can’t see it past your intentions, your busy schedule, your dreams of building something so personal out in the public. Your personal is all so public now. Did you mean for it to look that way when you started?
You were a tender, bleeding heart of a thing once. Still are. But quieter. Shorter and more intense. Concentrated like beef broth in low heat after hours. Gelatinous like that same stock after a long chill. Nothing sticks, instead it all absorbs. I know you. Melted away to a gentle unctuousness like the faintest pat of a butter. The mouthfeel is tangible, and still could be easily missed. You were a sensitive observer of the world, at sixteen years, in the business of grown folks. You were so obvious and also, so overlooked. Your mother, mothered. Your father, he parented. And no one can tell you what you were like as a child. As a girl. You were never a girl, though. Maybe you were only ever young.
It's been umpteen summers and I'm not in my bed
On the back of the bus and a bunk with the band
You don’t sleep much. Or very well. Never have.
But especially not in the winter. It is January of 2023.
You are up late again, watching Scandal and furiously cutting the headlines out of Ebony, Elle and Essence. You’re in want of representation…imagery that’s brown, buxom and bubbling over. You haven’t seen yourself yet, I think. Not clearly. Only ever something close.
Floating softly from the laptop’s speaker is the refrain from Robert Glasper’s “Better Than I Imagined” and it makes the room feel fuller. As the weight of rose gold scissors glides through thick, glossy paper once for silhouette and then twice for sharp edges… you find a small paper cut on your left index finger. The work you’ve done to feel safe for yourself is notable, and still, the tiniest things get to you.
You have gone looking for yourself in the fine print, again. There is only a drop of blood.
Sixteen dollars, workin' all day
Ain't got time to waste, I got art to make
Picture it. Sicily. 1922.
You haven’t done an uncomplicated thing in your entire life, I think. You’re riddled with thoughts you wish you did not need to say, or write, or type. It’s a fruitful compulsion. But you are compelled, begrudgingly, to tell people the things you write about them. And the things you think, too.
Your therapist noted in Thursday’s session the sadness that sits on your left shoulder, a muted red intensity hovering just slightly over your bosom. “All the now happy doesn’t take away the then hurt,” you snark back to her and she chuckles. She knows neither of you deserved that. You know, too.
Love is bringing up all of the ugly you buried, you sweet girl. Future planning has catapulted you backwards to 2002 to revisit a smaller Courtnee, to re-mother her before it’s too late. To let her play. To dig in the dirt. Safety will not absolve you of the need to get messy. To chase and be chased on the playground. When is the last time you ran with nowhere to be? Your head has been down, in a book or in bakeware for 5 years straight. sixteen to twentyone. It paid for school and still cost you everything. You were rarely social, not deeply connected, not fun. Maybe you were only ever young.
It's been thirty-eight summers and I'm not in my bed
On the back of the bus and a bunk with the band
Goin' so hard, now I miss my kids
Overworked and overwhelmed
It is the year 2000.
You have declared to an audience of teachers that you’ll be a chef when you grow up. “Like my mom.” Your mother reminds you later, at home, that she does not see herself as a chef. She just cooks well.
Love is more than the Thursday spaghetti nights you held onto from the house on Octandra Ct. It was the only romance in your childhood home. You will use the small details you remember to craft a skeleton love for yourself, and you will impose whatever handsome flesh finds you onto those bones and call that ribcage home. You will do this for ten years, and you will start at sixteen. You knew so little then. I wish someone had told you just how much you hadn’t seen. I wish someone had told you what you should have seen. The world was not at home with you. It just cooked well.
You do not know what romantic provision and protection look like. You will learn it eventually, when you are twenty-eight, under the loving umbrella of a warm man. He will know you to be sad some days and love you anyway, and other days will love you for your sad. And you will love him dearly and want to give the world to the person who met you in all of your effort and also stayed. Who loves you the way you do, like fragile art. And you will also know that this love is the consequence of the letters you wrote at midnight. And the hundreds of close friends stories. And the thousands spent in sessions with Black therapists. And so many bags of hot McDonald’s french fries. And tearfully telling mom you needed more than spaghetti night dreams to cling to if you were ever going to understand how love could look. And her hearing you.
To the summer sunset on a holy night
On a long back road, all the tears I fight
It is a late-August morning, days after your twenty-ninth birthday. You have packed up the very last of your belongings from your colorful apartment in Charlotte. You have said your goodbyes to girlfriends and clinked endless glasses to your new adventure. You are at home for the night, in your mother’s house, in the room that will always be yours.
As the golden sun breaks through the clouds over the trees in the backyard, your mom will tell you what you were like as a girl. Over coffee, she will tell you who you’ve been the whole time. Independent, curious, empowered, and always worried. It will be just hours before you drive to Atlanta, but this time as an again resident. To share your newfound womanhood with a man you trust. And you will not be able to pull out of the driveway to leave her. One day, you will understand that you were never hard to love. You were just asking the wrong questions.
I got love to create on this holy night
They won't dim my light, all these years I fight
It is 11 am in Barcelona, last November. Days after your favorite holiday.
You are in a heavy slumber, jet lagged, naked next to your lover, two weighty tangles of chocolate limbs, feet jutted out of the cool white sheets for temperature regulation. Looks like a thicket of roots so under each other that there is no over. And your head is on his chest, or back, or arm. You are. Where his heart beats. And where the heat is.
A knock from housekeeping wakes you up. And you’ll gather yourselves, untangling from the warmth to go explore the city. Right off from Le Meridien is the street most known for pickpocketing, and off you’ll go with intentional, newly naked hands stuffed into your own pockets. You do not know if the good people of Barcelona like butter. It has not tasted like it. “It all lacks soul, or salt?” Or spice. Lacks home. You need acid. But all there is. Is the memory of heat. And all the day’s search for flavor will be fruitless, even after a Michelin meal. Your reprieve, an emotional anchor from across the Atlantic Ocean, is found in a 2 am bodega run with your love, in the bitter cold of Barcelona’s empty streets. A familiar blue bag of salt and vinegar chips. And you remember.
A sour bite is still a familiar blessing.
You will lose so much of yourself in a year, much of it on purpose. Your corporate work. Your girlhood. Your address. Your damn mind. And some of you will get misplaced by accident. A large plastic bin with the fullness of your teenage memories. Everything you’ve kept since you were sixteen. And a few friendships with it. And you will grieve in no particular direction for a while. And then one day, you won’t. And you’ll make a Sunday pot roast and pair it terribly with sauvignon blanc.
The air will perfume, thick with freshly cracked black pepper and whole cloves of garlic. The marbled fat of the chuck roast will crackle and pop and whistle. The onions will go translucent and also brown at the edges. The beef bone broth will splatter from clumsy pouring. The dark soy will bubble at the rim of the pot. And you will cover the dish and let her simmer before transferring to the oven, the way that you taught yourself. The way that 2000’s Courtnee made promises to herself to learn to do. The way that sixteen year old Courtnee promised she would. The way that twenty-eight year old Courtnee practiced and then perfected. Maybe you were only ever young.
A bittersweet finish is still a familiar blessing.
I might cook, clean, but still won't fold
Still workin' on my life, you know
Only God knows, only God knows
Only God knows
Your words stir the blood. They leave me in awe, not quite stupefied but drowsy, intoxicated and then pristinely clear and awakened. Thank you for sharing your soul in this way. Long live and love the poets.
I love how Beyonce has brought us all together to an understanding of Longing & belonging and arriving. To feel seen & understood. Just another little black girl longing for the love that has not yet found her. I am happy you found yours.