Love is a damned thing. The more you love someone, the more you find along the way you don’t love them. You love the idea of them, a moment in time that no longer exists. You love the memory of who they used to be which means they were never that person. They exhibited behavior or a characteristic that was admirable or favorable. You look up and realize the person that you think you love is not the person that you made them out to be.
People get to be unpredictable every now and then. But unreliable? But so different that you look up to count all the years and realize you’re actually with a stranger versus the human that you thought you were with. What does that mean? The more I get to know this man the more I am shown he is less like me. That’s what love is, how much like me are you, right? How much will you reflect me?
Love is seeing yourself in another person and loving that part of them because you love yourself. But when you hate yourself it’s magnified in them in ways that make it hard to see one’s self. Trauma. Darkness. That’s what it is. We see them, we understand because we are them and they are us. There is sympathy and empathy in the same hand. But there’s also disgust and rage balled up in a tight, knuckle-cracking first because who wants to stand in front of their darkness and face it head-on when we prefer to avoid conflict? Especially when the darkness expresses itself differently. We pretend that we don’t understand it because while one partner shuts down the other partner won’t shut up.
Yet, it’s the same root emotion, right? Similar core wounds, almost identical triggers but you think it’s different because you shut down and they’re ramped up.
Lately, love feels akin to catching a thing. A thing that’s nearly grasped between all four fingers and the thumb that you allow to be intertwined with your beginning and your ending. It’s possession. Admiration may be long gone. That proud feeling of being sweet and getting warm and tongue-tied fades away into a knowing familiar that eventually becomes low-grade resentment over the years. When it comes down to it, you are not in your web alone. You’ve been caught too. Possessed. Held. Kept. Not belonging entirely to yourself.
I never dreamt of being anyone’s wife. There were no church halls, big white dresses, long trains and veils, family heirlooms or other gaudy dreams and little girl fantasies about a young naive girl who needed to be saved, rescued, loved. That might have had something to do with my little brother being shot and killed when he was just five years old. It might have something to do with watching my mother kiss Miles’ father over and over again while their actual spouses were working nights. What is there to believe in when you watch that love wane, disappear, and lay out in a pool of its own blood in the backseat of your mother’s station wagon?
Is love a curse? Dooming oneself to be with one person when you’re too young to know who you’re going to become? Or worse, tying yourself to one person when you want another? Maybe you’re too young to know what you want at all.
Love is loss. You lose yourself. Once a thing is loved and it realizes it is, that it is held on to instead of released, it begins to look for ways to free itself from the cage of its lover’s heart. The lover may need the cage. Furthermore, trapped fools don’t even know they’re in a cage. Break free from what?
He loved the idea of love while he was being adored and smiled at. When he looked in my eyes and didn’t see himself reflected in the wells of them, he pulled away. He pushed me to the corners of a memory he needed to recreate with me being the villian, for the future. Grief lived where young love sometimes showed up. I buried my mother, my little brother and my grandfather. Every now and again, the man I was to love and marry and hold til’ death do us part wasn’t enough to hold my attention. Truth. I wasn’t enough to keep his. Grief is misery. Ain’t nothing people hate more than a miserable person. Never mind we’re all holding pits of it in our bellies feeling worse than hunger pangs.
The image was better than the reality. The image of us, of our parents and what they started, the children of the great migration and the grandchildren of the civil rights movement – we were upstanding respectable black citizens. We come from a so-called good stock. Educated. Land owners. Enough wealth to reject welfare and avoid the bread and cheese lines for another week.
The funeral home director and the sergeant field officer of the chicago police department. On paper, he and I look like black love . and the american dream wrapped in black excellence. We are our ancestors answered prayer. What we can never say is that we’re burned out and burdened out from carrying loads our new age backs aren’t built to hold.
We are nothing to envy, covet, or be jealous of. We’re both performing dutiful, grateful adult children who were raised with the expectations to not ruin our family’s good name. On paper we look picture perfect. What we are is a storm that’s been hovering for a long time. Jayson and Nina Turner. Nine years of marriage. No children. All we know is the blood of our people. Yet, we can’t heal ourselves. Yep, a shit storm.
The morning was cloudy, it had rained all night. Everything was left damp and foggy in that way that made you want to get back in bed. Nothing good could come from a day where the morning air didn’t wash the dawn’s fog away.
Four weeks in and I’m still in a cast, not at work, and stuck in the house. The back yard is natural in that unkempt way that yards are when they’re neglected. Jayson is getting ready for work while I stand outside inspecting the pots of dead leaves and thawing weeds from plants that I didn’t get rid of before first frost.
Everything is so thick it feels like a wool covering. The only things that needs to be covered are cold and dead things. And secrets. Things people wanted to stay hidden. I felt something. I don’t know what I was feeling outside of wishing I wasn’t wearing a cast anymore. At least the pain and the sting in my chest was faint. I can button my shirt and close my robe. But something felt off. Ominous in a way that I wish I paid more attention to before I left the house.
It was the day that I would get shot again. Only this time, I’m sure my husband has something to do with it. I should have stayed right there on that porch instead of going outside. I should have left. The things that we wish we could go back and do over but differently. Ugh! Love ain’t worth dying over. It doesn’t look like we’ll make it to celebrate ten years.
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