When the Beat Came Back - Always & Forever
Growing up in New York in the ’70's taught you something about sound.
You learned that some of the best music didn't come polished. It came through a boombox with batteries barely holding on, a cassette dubbed so many times you could hear the ghosts of other songs underneath it. It came from somebody dragging turntables onto the block, finding electricity wherever they could, and turning concrete into a dance floor.
Maybe that's why OR Our Reality feels a little like hip-hop to me.
We were never some soft ballad playing quietly in the background.
Nah.
We were bass.
Two stubborn Caribbean souls with enough fire between us to cook Sunday dinner without turning on the stove. Two people loving each other loudly, intensely, imperfectly sometimes trying to spit our verses over each other instead of stopping long enough to hear what the other one was saying.
And for a minute, I really thought the record had stopped.
Not paused.
Stopped.
Like somebody had lifted the needle, packed up the crates and said, That's it. Party's over.
For the first time, there was no guarantee that OR would get another track.
And maybe that's what changed everything.
Because when something has always survived, you can start believing it always will. You get comfortable thinking there'll be another side to the cassette, another song, another chance to press rewind.
Until one day, there almost isn't.
Losing us or coming close enough to actually feel what life without us might look like did something neither one of our stubborn asses had been able to do before.
It changed the rhythm.
What came back wasn't the same relationship wearing fresh sneakers.
This feels different.
Intentional.
The kind of love that doesn't just tell me I'm wanted but moves in ways that make me feel chosen.
The kind that pays attention.
The kind that notices when my smile disappears and doesn't wait for me to explain why.
The kind that understands I don't want to spend another chapter of my life sitting beside uncertainty, wondering whether I'm investing precious years into something that will never fully become mine.
That fear used to hum underneath our relationship like static on an old cassette.
I could hear the love.
But I could hear the static too.
Now?
The signal is coming through clear.
And Lion, I see you.
I see every effort.
Every adjustment.
Every moment when pride could have grabbed the microphone, but love took it instead.
I see you making sure I spend more time smiling than wondering.
More time living inside our love than questioning where it's going.
More time feeling secure than counting years and asking myself whether I'm wasting them.
There is something incredibly sexy about being loved intentionally.
Especially by someone whose love has always been intense, but who is now learning how to make that intensity feel safe.
And us?
Please.
Two hardheaded Caribbean souls loving each other like somebody handed Harlequin a boombox, a workout bench and a bottle of coconut water and told them to write a love story.
We are ridiculous sometimes.
Passionate.
Complicated.
Funny.
Stubborn as hell.
But the love?
The love has always been the beat.
Maybe we just finally learned how to stop fighting over who was holding the microphone.
I have never loved another person the way I love you.
That's not something I say lightly.
There are pieces of me that recognize you before my mind even has time to catch up. There is a familiarity in loving you that feels older than our story, as though somewhere long before OR had a name, our souls had already heard this song.
And after everything, somehow the breakup didn't become our ending.
It became the DJ scratching the record backward just long enough for us to realize how much we wanted the song to keep playing.
So here we are.
Same two souls.
Different rhythm.
No more dancing around what this is.
No more letting fear drown out the music.
Just two people who came dangerously close to hearing silence and decided the music was worth fighting for.
They say when a record is scratched, it'll never sound exactly the way it did before.
Maybe that's true.
But this New York girl knows something else too:
Hip-hop was built from scratches.
From breaks.
From taking pieces of what already existed and creating something nobody had ever heard before.
Maybe that's us.
We didn't go backward.
We sampled the past, learned from the breaks, dropped a new beat...
and made OR all over again.
This time, I hope the record spins until we're old and gray still stubborn, still Caribbean, still getting on each other's damn nerves, still choosing each other.
Because after almost hearing the music stop,
forever suddenly sounds like my favorite song.
Comments