The sunshine reminds me of the anchor he cast me on my 36th birthday. After reading the compilation of my words, he wrote, “And the fact of the matter is you are loved, love and are loveable. That's some treasure to own.”
As I read those words in my tiny Clio in the car park, tears came. I’ve come to own my suffering, and could nearly feel what would be possible if I owned his words as well. I know intimately my capacity to love; yesterday reminded me as I reread the words capturing the loss of my auntie to suicide. Since the moment our eyes met, I knew nothing but unconditional, abundant love for her - more so as she shared her stories of survival, and fought against the whispers calling her to death. I know I’ve been loved, most deeply by my grandmother. The way she tended and fed me, how her crinkled face bloomed when hers met mine. Her love invited me to run to her whenever my spirit ached while she was still earthside. There are moments when I feel I might be loveable; I have so many faces who have locked eyes with mine to tell me so. Every so often, I try to let it in.
Love is an act of trust, and I marvel at its former ease. After leaving a partnership that threatened to smother me years ago, I’ve come to find love as terror. I remember all the times I’d fallen in love, the way it felt effortless. It wasn’t something I had a say in. My heart pulled me into connection with friends, partners, places. I’ve said in the past that I’ve realized I’m in love once I can’t resist the words spilling from my mouth. Now, there’s a hesitance, a waiting, a withholding - if the dam guarding my heart bursts, that means opening. Opening toward being left, manipulated, starved.
Now, romantic love means flipped coffee tables, lies, cocaine, adrenaline floods stealing sleep - even all these years later. Love means opening myself, my life, entirely to someone hands’ who can either mind me well, or dispel my sense of self, strength, and dignity. It means losing some of my dearest friends, not having an exit (try as I might), broken trust - in me, the world, that I won’t always be abandoned. Love means loss, chaos, pain, flight to avoid capture.
I remember what I told him last summer, how I pitied him. He said he’d never been in love, and in spite of all that I just wrote, I can still access the magic that is to be in love. When I think about Bluefields, I’m filled with it; the love of rondon, the smells (a blend of unknown muck, the sea, fried foods, heat), the waves of language swirling together, the cobbled streets, the organized chaos, Jimmy’s warm voice. When I remember my former loves, I can let bits of the expansive, connected wholeness back in. The letters I wrote him at last summer’s close, I could feel myself at the edge of letting myself love him - teetering on the edge of leaping toward a heart that felt nearly as closed as my own.
With deep breath, my bruised heart tells me she’s still there, longing to let more love in. It is to be treasured, and as I eye that anchor, I wonder how to let it back in. As I notice the edges of trust, what used to be effortless, I can feel the paralysis of it. How, or maybe more importantly, why, would I let someone back in? The risks feel like they outstack the benefits. But, as always, there’s that little tug, the child in me who remained open to trust, even when her heart and body were torn repeatedly. She wants to be wrapped again in the arms of love, the tenderness, the being seen, the intimate sweetness that we’ve found only in the arms of the few loves we’ve found to date.
There it is, the treasure. As I feel what I could access in myself inside partnership, I want her back. There’s treasure to share, and my heart knows the way. Now to practice the allowing back in.
