One thing I was taught about travel—because my father is a black man born in Alabama in 1950—was that there are safe places for black people to go and places that aren't as safe.
To exist solely now on land is to live always waiting to reenter the water—to feel soothed even by the sound of it falling. To live a life on land is to feel the loss of our former lives within our very faces.
In the broadest sense, I think of this work as being about the stuff of life: excitement, love, disappointment, pride, nature, cities, war, loneliness, work, class distinction, communication.
If we want to talk about desire, a gnawing ache for something we don’t yet have, or for something we’ve lost, we can say that we yearn for the transformation that the satisfaction of our desire will bring.