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“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.” —James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
It’s not just sex Edward has been stingy with lately. It’s attention. Conversation. Interest. All the things I found unexpectedly in a few moments with a stranger, and it feels like the sun on my face after winter. So hard to turn away from that warmth when you’ve stood out in the cold.
Tremaine and I took the boys around the community and introduced them to as many first responders as possible. There are too many horror stories of cops unwittingly mistreating a disabled person because they didn’t know or understand. In some cases it’s not ignorance but cruel mistreatment from someone in a position of power.
Add that to the fact that our boys are young Black men in an affluent neighborhood, and I’m not taking chances.
All loves aren’t created equal. Some spring from the earth and wrap around and twine through our souls like vines. Some are plants that start with tiny seeds in your heart and blossom over time, nurtured by years and commitment.
My sweet mother, who lingered after work to flip through the library’s new arrivals and loved the smell of books. Who knit in the evenings, glasses sliding down her nose while she watched Pat and Vanna on Wheel of Fortune.
What do you have without me, Sol? You won’t survive.” I look back over my shoulder and give him a smile that costs me everything but is worth the worry in his eyes. “Watch me.”
There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.
“You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.” She would dust her hands together. “You’re gone.”
For three generations, the women of my family wielded this knife. The machete is not just a line of steel, but a lineage of it. I use it now to cut down the insecurities, the shame, the hurt that will eat me alive if I let them.
Grammy told us that back in the day in Greenville, it was illegal for Black women to stay at home.” “What do you mean, illegal?” Hendrix frowns. “They passed an ordinance requiring Black women to work. During the First World War, Black soldiers would send money home to their families. For some of their wives, it meant they didn’t have to work outside the home for the first time.” “What was wrong with that?” Yasmen asks, sitting up, leaning forward. “When white women in town asked them to clean their houses and look after their kids, they didn’t need the money and refused.” I laugh, shaking my
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“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence
It’s the crisp autumn air on our faces, the smell of fresh hay and trees all around, leaves spiced with the colors of saffron, turmeric, and sumac.
Deliciously Autumn
“That’s ASMR.” “What the hell is ASMR?” “Autonomous sensory meridian response. It’s like feeling soothed or stimulated even by certain sounds, background noise, whispering, pages being turned. All kinds of things, but it makes you feel good when you watch it.”
Soledad hermosa. Beautiful solitude. Tears prick my eyes, spill over my lashes. It feels like a sign that I’m headed in the right direction, like a letter hooks sent encouraging me that I can be alone and not lonely. That this journey I’m on solo right now can be beautiful. I can be content. That my very name reflects this pursuit I’m on of renewal, understanding who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
When conversing with the heart, expect it to talk back, to revisit the pains and disappointments that left the deepest dents and scratches.
It’s in these quiet moments, in these conversations with my heart, that I realize I can never take responsibility for someone else’s bad character.
“I’ve come to realize that a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.”
Mami asked who my one true love was. I knew what she meant. Was it Jason or was it Bray? I told her I am the love of my life. I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition. It’s the only way I have enough love for everyone who needs it—to love myself. No one can love me like I do. No one knows me like I know myself.
what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. I know what he meant. When we have hard times, huge changes that seem to be the end of the world as we know it, it’s actually an incubator for metamorphosis. For a new beginning.
When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.
Our mother, the librarian who preferred books over parties and game shows over just about everything else, saw herself as a hornet. Loved herself fiercely enough that if no one else ever saw her, ever loved her fully, she would love herself enough to have some left over for everyone else.
