Leaving the US: Embracing Interracial Relationships Outdoors

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I originally published this on June 12, 2022 - Loving Day - six months after our first wedding anniversary. That’s how long it took me to write, edit, and get the courage to press “publish.” It became the first of many stories I’ve told about racial hostility aimed at my family for our “miscegenation.” It is one of the primary reasons we left the US in 2022.

Now, we are living in peace outside of the US, and just celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary yesterday!

At the beach.

Unbothered.

Joyous.

Free

It was one of those gloriously bright, extremely windy and slightly brisk days that feels like Fall up north, and feels rare and magical in Southwest Florida. As we hustled to the boardwalk leading to the beach, long strands of my curly hair got stuck in my lip gloss, which felt simultaneously annoying and glamorous. I’d had my hair cropped short since 2001, and only grew it out due to COVID; at first, because I wasn’t comfortable going into a salon, and then, to see how far I could go with it. I now have a love-hate relationship with it — lightweight but curly and apt to tangle, a product of the Italian roots I only recently learned existed, and possibly the 3% Afro-Caribbean ancestry, according to one DNA test. I was wearing sunblock on my face, because my fair skin is apt to burn when it’s been shielded from sun exposure chronically, as it has these last two years. Deevon "Wes" La Rue never wears sunblock, relying on his ample supply of natural melanin to protect him, passed down from his Nigerian, Cameroonian and Kenyan ancestors. We both wore jackets; it was a chilly 52 degrees in January. This was why we’d come to the beach on this day; the cold, which we’d expected and hoped would drive away other people.

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