Chaka...

I was four...

when rhythm became religion.

The television glowed like revelation,

a static halo around a Black woman

who did not ask permission

to be magnificent.

It was Soul Train—

dancers like orbiting planets,

lights blinking like a spaceship headed somewhere holy—

and then there was her.

Chaka.

I didn’t have the vocabulary for desire.

Didn’t know what a crush was.

Didn’t understand hips or heat

or why my small chest felt like it was opening

from the inside.

All I knew was something grabbed me.

The bassline walked in first—

confident.

The drums followed,

like a heartbeat I hadn’t yet discovered in myself.

And then her voice—

Her voice wasn’t singing.

It was commanding atoms.

It bent the air.

It told gravity to behave.

And there I was—

four years old,

too young to know what longing was,

old enough to feel it rearrange me.

Something happened in my body.

Not yet sexual.

But seismic.

Like my spirit leaned forward

and said:

There...

That...

That is what beauty sounds like.

She shimmered.

Hair wild like freedom.

Skin radiant like she had swallowed the sun,

and decided to glow on purpose.

I fell in love without knowing

that love could even fall.

I wanted...

I just wanted to stay in that sound—

that place where rhythm and woman

became indistinguishable.

Years later I would learn words:

attraction,

aesthetics,

erotic,

divine feminine.

But at four?

It was more simple:

I saw a Black woman

unapologetically powerful.

I heard music that felt like truth.

And my heart—

still soft with baby fat and innocence—

recognized something it would spend a lifetime chasing.

A man's first crush

is not about the woman.

It is about awakening.

Chaka did not know

that somewhere

a little boy sat cross-legged on carpet

having his first lesson

in beauty.

But she was the first woman

who made me feel

that rhythm

and reverence

could live

in the same body...