Where the Teeth Cannot Bite
Current Topic: An exploration of unearned grief
🎧 A sonic companion to Lucas’s journey from the 'hard line' of judgment to the heavy realization of a story he didn't know. This is the soundtrack of a compound night in the old country—where Eurocentric expectations collide with ancestral soil. From the frantic tension of the pool party to the quiet, haunted porches of a lonely childhood, these tracks are curated to help you sit with the truth: no matter how sharp your teeth are, you cannot bite water.
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Where the Teeth Cannot Bite
20 JAN 2025
BOUNDARIES BY MEN
“Jonathan wasn’t always like this.”
But how would Lucas know?
He didn’t even know the guy. So why should he care? Why should he have to give a fuck?
Funny how people rush to dissect a man’s reaction, yet suddenly go blind when it’s time to hold the offender accountable.
What a great first impression—getting too familiar with my woman while drunk at a family pool party.
Said no man ever.
Family or not, sloppy mannerisms were never tolerated where Lucas came from. You’d think Athena would’ve known better than to bring him back here. Her old country, surrounded by old friends… and older history.
What pressed Lucas most began as outrage at Athena’s response, then confusion at her loyalty. The anger shifted—her words suggesting he should just “cool off” after another man crossed a line left him feeling betrayed, then uncertain. Surely she knew better. You don’t tell a man to cool off when another man violates.
You never do.
Was he missing something?
Did it even matter if he was?
Still, Lucas didn’t know anyone here. But he knew Athena. And Athena knew him. So he led with that.
“Baby, wait a second… he’s not himself right now. Something’s wrong.”
“What do you mean something’s wrong—”
“—Baby. Something’s not right.”
And just before Lucas’ ego could decide how to respond, Jonathan bent forward and emptied his stomach all over Lucas’ $900 pair of bone white leathers.
IN DUE TIME
“I told the bartender to stop serving him. He’s been mixing all night.” Helena wrinkled her nose in revulsion as she grabbed Jonathan’s arm. “You can’t bring open bars to Africans.”
“Especially this one here.” Jonathan’s younger cousin, Kehlani, stepped in, taking his other arm and rolling her eyes at Lucas. The easy familiarity between them—cousins in the sprawling way families are here—said more than a lengthy explanation ever could.
“Lucas, I’m so sorry about that. Thanks, Athena, for cooling off the situation. We don’t need anymore black eyes for Jonathan.” Between them, they hoisted him upright and began the slow, awkward walk toward the house.
“We’ll talk soon,” Kehlani added, pausing at the door. Her eyes lingered just long enough to suggest weight. “There’s a lot to catch up on.”
45 MINUTES LATER*
On the drive home, Lucas’s frustration lingered at first, but as they drove, confusion and hurt edged in, refusing to leave him. The idea of what happened still plays around in his mind, shifting restlessly between these feelings.
“Are you going to explain,” he said, “or should I just sit with it? Is there history—”
“Don’t, Lucas.” Athena kept her eyes on the road. “I’m still trying to understand it myself.”
“It’s a yes-or-no question.”
“No.”
She exhaled. “This goes deeper. It’s not about us. Jonathan is a ghost of who he used to be. I need to talk to Kehlani.”
That look crossed her face again. Lucas knows all about it. Concern, threaded with something heavier.
“Jonathan wasn’t always like this.”
Lucas had grown up African, but this was his first time standing on the soil his mother came from. He didn’t understand the customs here, and he didn’t try to. He carried his own rules wherever he went.
But back home, the rules bend.
Not when everyone is family, but because they are.
Athena sent the text without another word. They agreed to meet tomorrow.
Lucas watched the road stretch ahead of them, smooth and dark, and wondered when exactly this stopped being his business and when it became something he wouldn’t be able to walk away from.
THE INTIMATE CONVERSATION
“It’s true. He wasn’t always like this. He was never like this.” Kehlani’s words set the tone for the couple. An imperative pivot from unknown disrespect to understanding grief.
Kehlani started the story like this.
“Jonathan grew up an only child in a two-parent home.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Lucas almost spoke. Almost.
“Sounds harmless, doesn’t it?” Kehlani caught the unspoken question. “That’s the common misconception.”
She leaned back, preparing herself for the unwinding of a person she once knew but was hoping would come back.
“They were never truly there together. One was always checked out, and the other was always leaving. Just a cycle of screaming matches and weeks of silence. They were both just sitting around, waiting for the other person to start caring first.”
They never did.
“Jonathan grew up making himself small. He learned how to be low-maintenance—how to make sure he was never the thing holding anyone back.”
“When they finally split, there was no fight for him. No tug-of-war. They just had other narratives to chase—different directions, separate lives.”
She paused, letting that quiet cruelty settle.
“He ended up with his grandfather.”
Not by design or a heartfelt choice. It was just the path of least resistance. It was the only thing that made sense.
“He didn’t treat Jonathan like a project to be fixed. There were no grand lectures, no forced breakthroughs. He was just... there. A constant, quiet shadow. He’d wait by the school gates or sit on the porch until the sun dipped, eating his dinner without a word. He let Jonathan exist without demanding a reason for it.”
Kehlani’s voice didn’t crack; it just thinned, worn down by the weight of the memory.
“He stayed. He was the only one who never looked for the exit.”
Lucas shifted, the leather of his seat creaking in the silence.
“He died last year.”
A flat statement. No mourning period, just a sudden, empty space in the conversation.
“And since then, And since then, Jonathan has been unraveling.”
Helena spoke with weary elegance, her voice cutting through the compound’s humid air. “Drinking more. Saying the wrong things. Acting out in rooms full of family because it’s the only place he doesn’t feel entirely invisible.”
She looked at Lucas then—a silent, heavy appraisal.
“He’s not mad. He’s untethered.”
Lucas exhaled through his nose. The fight drained out of him, slow and quiet, like fine sand slipping through an hourglass.
His mind went to the shoes.
The calculated disrespect of them.
The way he’d already cataloged Jonathan, assigned him a type, filed away the man he believed him to be.
For the first time that night, Lucas allowed himself the uncomfortable luxury of letting go of being right. This turning point softened the edge inside him—defensiveness fading to reluctant understanding.
He didn’t excuse the behavior. The transgressions remained.
But the truth behind them settled in the silence between them. Understanding, though not absolution, connected the broken threads of the story so far.
And that sat heavily. It always did.
Jonathan was no longer a villain in Lucas’s head; he was a boy he finally recognized. The distance between them collapsed—two men, two lives, both shaped by what they lacked. Kehlani’s words had stripped away the armor of Lucas’s judgment. “Jonathan grew up an only child in a home that still didn’t see him.” The sentence played on a loop, a sharp truth he couldn’t stop feeling.
Rent free in his head.
WHAT IS GRIEF?
You saw the story unfold, right? You might’ve shifted with it—feeling the spike of disrespect, the urge to defend, to draw that hard line. Then slowly, vulnerability steps in, rearranging what you thought you knew.
Grief itself is usually described as the intense sorrow caused by someone’s death. But what is grief if it doesn’t belong to you?
How do you hold space for the pain you didn’t earn? How do you stand close to someone else’s loss without turning it into a performance of empathy?
Be honest, compassion is complicated. Yes, it’s genuine at times, but sometimes it is also a softer way of centring yourself. A way to feel moral without being changed. The difference shows in what you do after the story is told.
Lucas lives in environments that reward reaction. Eurocentric spaces, crabs in the bucket, clear rules about how men are supposed to respond.
“Don’t be a b*tch.”
“I wouldn’t take that.”
”Keep your foot on the neck.”
You learn quickly that restraint is praised only when it looks powerful, and anger is only acceptable when it’s justified by the crowd.
So you sharpen your teeth. You prepare to bite back.
But some situations don’t bruise under pressure. No matter how sharp your teeth are, you can’t bite water. You can thrash, you can react, you can insist on your code, and still miss what’s actually happening in front of you.
Now imagine carrying all that Jonathan had been carrying. A life where grief piled up quietly, without native language. A loss so central it hollowed him out, yet left him standing. His mouth couldn’t deliver the message that might’ve softened the judgment. He didn’t have the words. He didn’t have the timing. He didn’t even have the self-awareness yet.
So someone else had to speak for him.
His cousin told the story she wasn’t supposed to. It needed telling. Because when grief is left untranslated, it turns into behavior—and behavior, as Lucas learned, becomes the bridge between misunderstanding and truth.
Stories have always been the first language men understood. No matter the narrator, you’ll hear one better than you’d understand an explanation. Stories put shape to what the quiet carries.
Jonathan’s story didn’t excuse his actions.
It contextualised them.
That’s the uncomfortable truth about grief. It demands your attention, whether you want to give it or not. The moment you understand where a man’s pain comes from, you’re no longer dealing with a villain. You’re dealing with a human being standing in the aftermath of something he hasn’t learned how to carry yet.
And what you do with that understanding —
whether you weaponise it, ignore it, or let it refine your boundaries —
This is where your character actually lives.
The Hood Author’s Note
Grief doesn’t always show up with tears and a soft landing.
Sometimes, it shows up as a line crossed. It shows up as a test of your patience, your pride, and the code you live by. It shows up as a $900 pair of ruined shoes and a choice you didn’t ask to make.
The question isn’t whether the behavior was right—it wasn’t. The question is: when a man’s pain finally leaks out sideways, do you rush to bury him for how he’s acting, or do you pause long enough to ask who taught him to carry that weight alone?
Boundaries are necessary. But you have to know what you’re actually drawing them around.
I didn’t write this to excuse the mess. I wrote it because judgment is a cheap currency when you don’t know the history, and restraint is only real when compassion asks you to grow past your own ego.
If this sat heavy with you, good. That’s where the shift happens.
If you’re looking for stories that do more than just fill the silence, stories that challenge the way we see men, the way we see pain, and the way we see ourselves,
Then you’re in the right place.
This is where the truth gets dressed properly. And where the 10Community lives. 💜🥂
IN10MACY DOES NOT EXIST WITHOUT THE INTIMATE CONVERSATION.
I’m trying something different with the community. This space wasn’t built for passive reading; it was built for us to speak, to learn, and to evolve together. That evolution starts with you.
I’ve prepared four questions for the 10Community. I invite you to share your perspective on one, or all, in the comments below.
Please label your responses in number format (e.g., 2. I believe...) so we can keep the dialogue flowing clearly.
QUESTIONS
Boundaries · How should men set boundaries when another man's pain causes harm?
Actionable steps · What practical steps can men take to support each other through grief without excusing bad behavior?
Personal growth · How can men recognize when their own reactions are shaped by unprocessed pain or cultural expectations?
Relationships · How can partners navigate loyalty and support when caught between two men’s pain?
Let’s have the intimate conversation in the comments below. 💜🥂
I want to get this as a tattoo - “So you sharpen your teeth. You prepare to bite back.”
It speaks to me 💜
Great read!