"What do you want, N'Jadaka-"
"Erik." He corrected, making her smirk.
"For someone who is so against the colonizers, you wear your colonized name with such pride-"
"That colonized name holds more pride and honor than my birth name."
"Nigga... I don't need you trying to be Steve Harvey." I stood up from the position that I was in while he kept walking. Another woman walked in between us, who had long blonde hair, and Y'lan nearly lost his mind. He was always the chill type, but he hated rude shit like that; I knew it took everything in him to not act out. "She took me to where my mom's buried."
He stopped walking dead in his tracks and looked at me with slightly wide eyes. Y'lan was the only other person who knew about me losing my mom, but I still didn't tell him every little detail. He just knew that she died, I never got the chance to see her, and never knew where she was buried. I never liked going into detail about it, and thankfully, he never pushed the conversation. "I thought no one knew where—"
"She went around and started looking things up— she found her, and took me yesterday."
"Look," he sighed. "I don't know much about what you both do aside from what you tell me and what I see, but if it's to the point where you're talking to her about family, and she's making that much of an effort to help you? That's something you can't let go of, at any point, E. You gotta lock that down."
"Baby!" Sage whispered through the halls as she came back in our direction.
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A older woman shushed her— despite her not yelling, only for Sage to completely stop walking and look over at her; looking her up and down. "You're probably eight breaths away from it being your last, and you wasted ninth breath to do all that. Please, find some business to get into that's not mine—" She was cut off by Y'lan putting his hand on her mouth and pulling her over towards him.
"Baby... don't start that here. Unseasoned establishment, remember?" He reminded her, and she nodded her head. Even with his hand on her mouth, I could tell she was still smiling because of how small her eyes got from squinting. "Now, what's wrong? Why you so excited?"
I walked off to let them talk about whatever they needed to, and found Mbali looking up at a large painting of a Black woman. It was bigger than her, so her attempt to look up at it was comical. As soon as I stood behind her, she sighed. "He's the only Black artist in this entire museum. There's three floors in this place... only one black artist." She shook her head. "Isn't that crazy? And it's only one work from him— they definitely counted him out."
"How'd you know I was behind you?"
She turned and looked up at me, smiling softly and shrugging. "Your thoughts are loud." She looked back at the painting. It was a woman who was probably the same shade as Sage, with one side of her hair in its natural-coil state, but the curls were made up of derogatory terms, while the opposite side of her hair was straightened, and had positive terms associated with it. Her expression was the same, but you could see the happiness in her eyes with her hairs natural state, compared to the straight look. "What do you think it means?" She took a step back so that we were both standing directly next to each other. She rested her head against my forearm, and didn't care to move.
