Love Is
Love is my father's, "Hey, My Baby." It's the way he took on a family he did not create and loved us beyond DNA. Like there were no barriers between his heart and ours. Love is the way his being healed parts and pieces I didn't know were in need of recovery. Lake Erie took my father's body but everything about who he was and how he loved remains. Godfried, I am so very grateful he had the most fitting and wonderful company on the way to the other side. Your love and memory also remain.
Love is the stunning Toni Morrison. And what she did with words. And what her words did and continue to do in and through us. Love is reading sentences that rearrange you, give you pause and demand you slow down and take the story in, fully. Love is your fabrics and textures woven into the center of a story no matter how messy and unworthy you may feel. Love is the way Ms. Toni Morrison loved us.
Love is sometimes this nearly unbearable splitting. Being cracked opened and asked to attend to your ugly ways of thinking, existing and unresolved trauma. It's being pointedly told, "our relationship will not survive if the wounded little girl in you continues to lead you. And I'm not sure you will either." Love is finding that little girl some help. Love is allowing that little girl permission to rest; no longer tasking her with carrying burdens she was never prepared to bear.
Love is candles, the smell of coffee and a quiet, cloudy, and blissfully still morning in Decatur, Georgia.
I am my mother. I am full of the same small, irritating behaviors of hers that drive me up a wall. I am also my mother's only daughter. A recipient of her sweetest love, wisest words and most infectious laughter. I am full of her love. The love that allows me to love. To recognize it when I see it. And to honor it however it finds me. I am my mother. And I like it here.
Love is the way I can get on the phone with my brothers and before one full breath is taken we are completely undone by fits of laughter. About everything and nothing at all. Brothers as best friends. That's love.
I met you when I was 21. You were 18. We just met the 43rd and 40th birthdays a few weeks ago. And here we are. Through many configurations of life and death and all sorts of beautiful, beautiful highs and devastatingly low, lows. Still here. Thank you for teaching me the enduring strength of love and how it persists. My heart soars at the thought of the series of tomorrows and mornings I get to have with you.
Love is family gathering, drinking, laughing, arguing and telling lies.
Love is activating more of your own lust. For you.
Love is black music, black art, black people, black history, black stories, black humor, black creativity, and all the black black thangs. That's us. Love.
Love is my nieces and nephews and those high cheekbones and vibrant eyes and the way funny moves through them. Witnessing the depths and multitudes they possess at such a young age. That's them. The purest form.
Love is all of this and so, so much more.
Love is you. The you handed out weekly to friends. The work you. The you you keep for you. You are love. All of you. Through and through.