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“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
He was ambitious, yes, and sometimes careless, but something is rotting inside him now. It’s only lately I’ve smelled the stench.
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.
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.
No one is on the way to rescue you. No one is on the way to save you and your girls. At the end of the day, it’s up to you.
Does he assume that since I’m alone I’m desperate? I’ve never felt less desperate in my life. I feel powerful, like I no longer need to squeeze myself into smaller spaces to clear room for others. Maybe I was afraid I wasn’t big enough to occupy all this space alone.
“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
“I’ve come to realize that a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.”
“I would hack through a forest to get to this pussy, and I’ve waited long enough.”
I’m actually dead
There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.
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.
“You are my prince.” But there’s nothing for him to save me from, because I’ve saved myself. He doesn’t have to awaken me with a kiss. I’m wide awake, reborn, rebirthed through my own fire and pain and work and wisdom.
