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If even half of this is true, then my husband is not who I thought he was. Then the father of my children is a liar. A criminal. Untrustworthy. Irresponsible. Reckless. And how could I not know?
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.
I grab that tacky tie Edward’s mama gave him with the red polka dots and chop chop chop until it bleeds all over the closet floor in a mound of ruined silk. More.
“There’s one thing I’m not sure what to do about,” he says, his gaze intense and unwavering on my face. Somehow I know he means me. Or this thing that’s been tugging me toward him since the second we met. And I’m not sure if there is anything to do about it. I need to focus on rebuilding a life for me and my girls from the ground up. I also need to rebuild me. A me who doesn’t need a man, stands on her own, and gets what she needs to survive, even if she has to make it herself.
“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence
“Same thing you’d do for me if I was about to lose my house and you had the money.” She looks up from her phone, the regal lines of her face softening. “I spent that in bags and shoes last month, Sol. I’m doing really well. Ain’t no way I’m standing by and watching you and your girls get put out when I could help.”
“What would happen if I turned all that love on myself? Not in a narcissistic way, but in terms of unconditional acceptance? Of truly attending to my hurts instead of expecting someone else to heal them?”
He doesn’t simply look at me. He takes inventory, slowly considering every detail from my head to my feet. The look is so discreetly hot and wanting, my toes curl in my shoes, like that look is a lick that runs the length of my body, stopping to sample secret places along the way.
She walks away, leaving the two of us standing together, wrapped in warm light and the savory scents of dinner. My breath stutters at his nearness, at the smell of him, the look of him, so tall and broad and imposing. Yet safe. Really safe.
I’m trapped in this moment—the clean, intoxicating scent of him, the heat of his body this close, the intensity of his eyes caressing my face, my neck and shoulders bared by my dress—but instead of fighting my way out, I long to burrow in for a few stolen seconds.
“People don’t do that,” she continues. “What you did for Mrs. Garland, most people don’t do. Most people aren’t you.”
I decide to read a little more to finish the chapter. I’m nodding when she discusses creating domestic bliss, a household where love can flourish. “Spot on,” I say, reaching for a handful of the roasted almonds I keep by my bed for the night growls. My hand stills midreach when I read the next line. hooks calls her house in the country a sanctuary and refers to it as “soledad hermosa.” The brakes in my head screech, bringing me to a complete stop. My name. Right here in the book that is slowly but surely restitching the fabric of who I am. Soledad hermosa. Beautiful solitude.
“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
He’s big and handsome and warm, and his clean, masculine scent encircles me. His stare stalks me, and every cell of my body is screaming, Catch meeeeeee.
My friends, my sisters, my daughters. My great loves.
I want her to be whole. I just want to be whole with her.
“Like I discovered a new planet. Like I walked on air.”
I don’t look up, even when I feel their stares, but flip through a tattered copy of Waiting to Exhale.
He said what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
It’s a honeycomb kiss with sweetness hidden in crevices, tucked under her tongue and in the sweet lining of her mouth.
I don’t ask her if that’s okay or if she has a problem with it. I love my girls, and they have been the center of my life since the day they were born, but they also deserve a happy mother.
Fresh tears sting my eyes because I’m so grateful, not just for this one act he has done but for him. Nothing in my mother’s diaries, nothing I read in bell hooks’s musings, could have prepared me for this man. For this astonishment of care and joy and grace.
