I Saw Her First

A lesson in surrender disguised as a birthday weekend.

I dropped my keys onto the bed with the pile of dresses from my failed mission to get contacts. Forty minutes. That’s what I had to turn this athleisure incognito birthday girl into someone that made heads turn and eyes wonder if they were the only ones that had seen her.

I turned Alexa on — not Apple Music’s pillowtalk playlist, but the rotation of songs that made me sway and sing. I dabbed the beauty blender, flicked the brush across my face, lined my lash line with the new black liner that arrived earlier that week. I had a pimple — an actual sized one that lowkey hurt — and I let her sit. Proof of youth. Proof of humanity. You can’t dress up and make up to wash away that part of yourself, no matter how the end result may alter your perception.

I pulled apart the intact spirals from my flexrod set and saw her unthawing.

There she was.

@herblackhandLove a midnight curl! #microlocs #curlylocs #flexirods

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My eyes gave drama. My hair was full and bouncy. My perfumes mingled with each other the way I’d hoped. The dress fit beautifully. I had spent a whole week trying to figure out how to present this woman, and here she was — assembled, whole, ready. I didn’t need anyone to confirm it. I saw her first.

When I came around the corner, the room shifted.

I felt it before I saw it — the way the air changed, the way attention moved. The night confirmed everything the mirror had already told me, and something in my spine responded. I sat a little straighter. I walked a little slower. The admiration wrapped around me like the softest silk scarf resting on my shoulders — weightless, warm, entirely mine to receive.

I had spent so long prompting the world to see me. Asking for it. Angling for it. Performing for it.

That night I just walked in.

And the night walked toward me.

We were only slightly late to my reservation.

The restaurant was emptier than I’d imagined but they had a DJ and the music filled the space that the crowd didn’t. Now was he good…ehh debatable. His set felt more like an unexperienced lover. A jerking—edging. And not the kind we like. More like I love you then we breakup and now we’re back together then we break up again. Whiplash.

I’d been practicing something lately — letting the night take the lead. Not managing, not directing, trying not to fill the silence with my own noise. But here I didn’t have to practice. The evening had its own momentum and I felt myself surrender to it naturally, the way you exhale without deciding to.

We ordered whatever we wanted. We danced at the table. We laughed loudly. We talked with the waitress about her trip to Punta Cana and my trip to Colombia. We knew we’d be hungry again before the night was over because we always were, and there was something tender about that — the way a night can know you. The bill came and I let it be handled and didn’t make it complicated. Small surrenders. Little acts of receiving.

Then the lounge.

The drinks, the music, the body moving without thinking about how it looked moving. For a moment I was in the middle of a dance floor without a single care about who was watching or what they thought or what story they were telling themselves about me. I was exactly where I wanted to be and it showed.

The night flirted with me on the way out. Lingered at the edges. Reached for my hand as the it found its way to its next doors opening. And for the first time in a long time I didn’t rush toward what I wanted — I waited for it to come to me. Because I’d been rewiring something in myself. Learning that what is freely given can be trusted. That you can’t categorize a gift as real if you prompted it yourself.

So I waited.

And the night gave it to me anyway.

The weekend had its own language and I let it speak.

We held each other. We rested. We ate. We watched movies that didn’t have any animation — which sounds small but felt like an act of being known. We laughed at things that didn’t need to be explained. I didn’t ask for reassurance. I didn’t reach for more than what was being offered. I let the hours be what they wanted to be without my hands shaping them into something I needed.

This was the new thing I was learning about myself — that my silence was not absence. That my stillness was not passivity. That when I stopped filling every room with my wanting, something else rushed in to fill it instead. I had spent so long driving that I’d never known what it felt like to truly be a passenger. To look out the window. To trust that someone else knew the way. Or that their way was safer than my own.

I let the weekend lead.

And the weekend rose to meet me. Again and Again and Again.

There is something that happens when you have already loved yourself well before anyone else gets the chance. You stop being hungry in a way that makes you grab. You become the kind of full that allows you to receive slowly, to taste things instead of swallowing them whole. The weekend lingered on me the way Im learning to linger on myself — unhurried, deliberate, like every detail was worth the time it took to notice it. In a spirit of devotion.

I didn’t know what any of it meant for tomorrow. I didn’t ask. Some things are only yours to hold in the moment they are happening, and the asking turns them into something smaller than they were.

So I held it.

And it held me back.

If you have never made love to yourself, anyone who tries will always fall short.

Not because they aren’t enough. But because you couldn’t show them how. You haven’t shown yourself how. You haven’t stood in a mirror with forty minutes and a pimple that lowkey hurt and chose yourself anyway. You haven’t pulled apart your own spirals and watched yourself unthaw. You haven’t walked into a room slowly enough to feel it shift. You haven’t layer 3 different oils to make sure you look like the sweetest Krispy Kreme glazed dozen.

I turned twenty six in the middle of learning this.

And the weekend — the whole beautiful, unhurried weekend — was the world’s way of showing me I was getting it right. That when you linger with yourself, you give others the permission to linger with you. That when you stop prompting and start receiving, life fills the space you leave. That stillness is not emptiness. That full is not the same as satisfied. That you can be held without being kept.

By the end of it, I felt like I was being reintroduced.

Not to someone else.

To myself — through familiar eyes with new perspectives. The woman who had grown. And underneath her, still present, still recognizable, still worth finding,

the woman I had always been.

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Thanks for spending a few minutes of your life with mine. Twenty-six already feels like it's teaching me a lot, and I have a feeling this next year will give us plenty more to write about. If you'd like to stay for it, subscribe. If something here lingered with you, you can also leave a tip to support my work. Either way, I'm glad you were here.