Let them tell it—I’ve never been one for choosing lovers. Kinda like I was always discovering myself with them, like I was waiting to see what I could give with no return, what I could want with no shame. If the few lovers I’ve had live to tell of my loving, let it be unregrettable information. I hope I made them smile more than insecure. I always felt like I left them a little offering, a piece of me within them that somehow let them grow, leave, and evolve. I’d like to think touch is magic, even when they don’t, that us touching each other was making more room in the world for love. As if I were healing us with this touch, with this spaceship of a body. I wanted us to travel there, where only two people in love could go. This is not for the hopeless romantic, rather, this is to all the cynics within, all those shards of glass, the nerds, the untouched and left behind, misunderstood and mocked.
Unconditional love is silent, mispronounced or unannounced. It is never realized immediately, thus its reputation for patience. Or rather, it’s a deafening sound. It’s what we learn in passing as we turn the age of our elders, those who raised us. We grow from girls to women, boys to men and we learn to become adults, to look after and care for ourselves. Slowly we begin to grasp the intensity of what it might entail to be a single mother, the daughters who raise the seeds of fleeting wind, clumsy feet, and rolling stones. These are special kinds of women.
My mother always said, “One day when you’re older, you’ll understand, when I’m dead and gone.” It was always this warning, this inevitable reality I knew of and yet could not prepare for. She isn’t dead and I can’t hold a conversation long enough with her to forget the heartache she raised me as, the shy regrets she can’t bring herself to take responsibility for. If I would’ve known then, what I know now, I would’ve asked her to pray with me more. I would’ve tried to prevent all this distance between us and never left her side. I would’ve asked her to never let me go…
Instead, I took the world in for breathing. I devoured every act of kindness I’ve come across and mimicked it’s manners. I imagined loving the world as if, for her. As if I could return all these favors in my blood waiting to not be taken for granted. If someone gives you love, real unconditional love— let it not be in vain. Give it with ease. We ought to know what it’s worth. We ought to believe in its’ security and sacrifice. The ones we fell for, falling hopelessly, and sometimes apologetically, still with all the universe of a womb to guide us. It isn’t ours to give no how. It belongs to the wholeness, the deep darkest unknown of us, to those that came before and those that will come after. You see, it must be selfless and pure. It has to be, our children are not ours, our husbands and wives, our lovers—they are their own universe realizing purpose, but that great train called love! Rushing through the tunnels of our nervous system, many people wish to possess that which cannot be possessed. If I could believe in anything, it will be the goodness. The foresight to recognize our patterns and because of them, how they must be shook and broken.
I never understood people who leaped from relationship to relationship. The love they denied themselves and therein all those suffering hearts that had to face the reality of walking voids. And yet, I understand it all too well. I can’t seem to put my finger on what I’m waiting for, all these visions dancing on the walls in my bedroom. The people we couldn’t allow to love us. The boys I could never save; the gift of giving I was always trying to give. When you impart some one with an act of kindness, with a passionate kiss, a careful touch of skin, the catastrophic firework of two people thrusting, when you offer consoling words, or deep diaphragm laughter, when you give a stranger a smile—you are thanking the universe for love. You are fueling the world with a context for how to receive and give love. Your words are not to be taken lightly nor ever too seriously, because they speak reality into existence. It is our imaginations that will save us from ourselves. It is the ability to gravitate towards the goodness inside you. It took me years to be this woman and time is of no relevance. Its what you do with time that transforms seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, and hours to days so on and so on.
No one prepares you to have everything you know transformed and how you’ve known it to be. No one ever told me flat out—never stop loving. I’ve known some tragic things to be possible, I’ve seen what hurt people can do. All that possibility with an ounce of our free will and might, who ever got us thinking less of ourselves? Where was it that we first learned to expect the worse and pray for the best? Where did I learn all these habits? If I am human, what is my role? Are we even human? (ha.) When do I expect better of me? Of me. First, me. When was it that I first listened to someone tell me I could be better? How did they say it? What was the belief they had in my potential? When did I start taking love for granted?
If it is true, that we choose our parents long before we get here, if it is true that once we have arrived there is a crowd in the cosmos waiting for us to be realized— why here? Why now? What is it that brought all these miracles into play, because they are miracles, ya know.
If two people loving each other, creates another life, what is conspiring in the universe to bring that life through them? What is our responsibility to be wise in the choices of our lovers? Is this not the beginning of a future? Is it not now in all this loving madness that we have the power to transform each other through the futures we aspire to create, together.
I came to Paris, not to find, not in search of or for but rather with an awe. Discovering one’s capacity to love is an intimate journey with self, not for the sake of another, but for the survival and perseverance of self. It is a journey we all deserve and are responsible for.