When I Think of You

by Myah Ariel

My life’s greatest accomplishment is winning the love of my wife, Minnie, and sustaining it all these years.

“Look what love made.

“It was more than loving him,” he says almost forcefully. “She knew him. Every part of him. And she loved him because of, and in spite of, all of it.” “That’s it, right?” I wonder aloud.

all those special moments with the guy who will be your forever—the giddiness you feel after the first date, that electricity from your first kiss, those flirty texts the morning after you spend the night—it’s no longer in the past. The good stuff’s in front of you waiting to be experienced with the guy who is your actual person.

“Because he’s your mirror,” I say. “You see him, and all your wants and desires reflect back at you. Then, when he inevitably falls short of your high expectations, it’s not just him you’re disappointed in, it’s also yourself, for misplacing all that hope.”

Someone had to be the collateral damage on his journey of self-improvement. And I guess that someone was me.

“But one conversation with you left me feeling like I’d lived my whole life just sniffing air, not really breathing it. Not like you. I wanted to be like that—I wanted to be with someone like that. But I didn’t know how.”

Tragedy has a way of doing that, you know? Reminding you that you’re human and capable of being gutted.”

That’s what it’s like in the after—living a whole life without the man you’re never too far away from thinking of.

If I’m honest with myself, holding on to all that stuff after all this time feels like a choice. Like in doing so, I’m choosing to be weighed down. Now is as good an opportunity as ever to stop being a bag lady. Someone who hoards all her trauma and drama, packing it away in various bags for safekeeping. Carrying them along with her everywhere she goes so she can unfurl them from time to time, if only just to admire all her problems. It’s time to move on.

‘There’s people that won’t like you no matter what you do. You just can’t give ’em a reason for it.’

She knew all this effort we’d made to make me palatable wasn’t going to make a difference. I was going to be well-dressed and well-spoken but still Black. She was scared for her little girl.”

I’m either going to meet the man of my dreams, a complete disaster, or someone entirely forgettable. And the chances it’s the first of the three are only dwindling.”

I think the difference must have had something to do with the collective effervescence of our youthful naïveté.”

“We were young and dumb and hopped up on the heady experience of living in a city that promises you everything but grants you nothing in return.

smarmy

So I look at What Love Made as a tribute to those of us in the past and present who had the courage to love and live freely, even when the law said otherwise.”

“I’m not in a position to not take it personally when I’m repeatedly overlooked and disrespected by the people in positions to either help or hurt my career. It’s a privilege to not care about how those in power perceive you and treat you. And as much as I desperately want to just show up and ‘do me,’ that’s a privilege, too—another one I don’t have.”

I hear you. I see you, too.”

Everything about Danny screams “ladies’ man,” and not in the sleazy way but in the quietly beautiful, disarmingly sensitive way that makes him so desirable.

“If love’s not a feeling, what is it?”

You don’t just feel love, it’s a state of being. Like breathing. You don’t think about it, you just do it. When you’re in love with someone, it changes you.”

“I told myself this morning I wasn’t going another day without kissing you,”

But you, baby, when you’re not with me, you get to walk around proud, own every room you enter. It’s not ’til I’m on your arm that anybody looks at you like anything less than a king.

That once I was in love with a boy who utterly and completely shattered my rose-colored glasses, and I came to terms with never having closure, never getting the chance to tell him how ruined I’ve been for other loves ever since. That I can accept I may have hurt him, too, but the simple truth is he hurt me first.

I just wanted to make sure you’re thinking through the possibilities here, because some doors lock when they close.”

I wish I could blink and somehow disappear to a calm, quiet place where I happen to have my shit together.

You know that feeling when a song comes on the radio that you haven’t heard in years, and instantly, it’s your favorite song all over again? That’s you. You have been my favorite song all over again since the moment I walked into WAP and saw you at that reception desk.

Because when all is said and done, you are perfect to me. And I am ready to stop pretending that getting along fine will suffice in the place of perfect.

Truth is, I didn’t free-fall into love with Danny Prescott. I jumped headfirst and tumbled my way here. And even after all those cuts and bruises, I’m still falling, wondering if maybe this time we can land together.

Kal, How can I get through days when I can’t get through hours? Yours, Danny

I am no longer just playing with fire. I have become the flames.

Don’t confuse history with mere memories of the way things made you feel.

I can’t let myself fall for Danny again until I understand why he didn’t catch me the first time.

I have flown too close to the sun, and now, my ass is toast.

“Ms. Butler says it made her think of how we tend to dress our children up in our love,”

“We don’t really learn about grief until we’re in it,”

“We can read a million pamphlets and watch a hundred talk shows on the topic, but nothing prepares you for what it feels like. It’s gaping and persistent and cold.

I get it. Making love comes with the added understanding that on top of this undeniable chemistry and attraction, our hearts are in on it, too.

“I really thought this time you’d stay,”

The boy I projected all my silly notions of love and desire onto while he was carrying a world of hurt around inside of him. The boy I’d foolishly entrusted with my heart without realizing that he was busy tending to his own. And now we’re both broken.

“You know my feelings for him are like glitter. You think you’ve swept it all up, but when you look in the mirror it’s in your hair and all over your face.”

Do you want to be liked? Or do you want to be happy? Answer that and damn the rest.”

When he died so suddenly, it was like she had to carry all the love they’d built together on her own.

“It was like her grief wasn’t a burden anymore. It wasn’t just a reminder that she had lost the love of her life. But it was proof their love existed.

“I found love, and it’s the best thing in the world,” he explains. “But I’ve lost it, too—which feels like a metaphor for life. How it’s just an endless cycle of things lost and found.”

“I learned a valuable lesson: it’s really not my business what other people think of me.”

“What matters most is if at the end of the day, I can say that I took everything I had, all the tools at my disposal, and focused them toward an end goal I could be proud of.

Sometimes we get stuck admiring our problems, but nothing changes if we don’t actually confront them.

Theirs was a life that love made beautiful.