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It’s just me and my battle scars and bald spots.
Can you be here for me, with me, while I stop fighting and let myself feel this? I promise I’ll get back up, but for just a minute, let me fall.”
“Now that is a man,”
Forgiving is harder than forgetting. Forgetting would be the oblivion of never knowing how you hurt me. Forgiving is accepting you hurt me, deciding that I’m going to keep loving you anyway.”
“Tomorrow,” she says from the screen, from a wheelchair precipitously close to the edge of a pier, “is the most presumptuous word in the world, because who knows if you even get that. Yesterday, spilled milk and old news. You can’t do nothing about how you messed up or fell short or didn’t do yesterday. Even when you mess up and make it right, it has to be done today.”
Better todays make better tomorrows, and if you don’t get tomorrow, at least you had today.”
“This body is a shell,” she says, her voice sober. “No matter how beautiful or what size or how healthy, every single body inevitably returns to dust. It is not your legacy. It is not what you leave behind.”
When family needs you, you go even if they don’t call.”
I realized I loved her just before I realized I could lose her, and that has tortured me.
Maybe my heart recognized immediately who Neevah was to me—my light, the part that would fit with me like we were crafted for one another—but disguised it as admiration, lust, desire, need. Emotions I could accept, giving me time to fall in love. Inevitably. Irrevocably.
Just let me suffer until you’re completely healed.”
You always asking for the world, Odessa. DESSI And you the man who gives it to me.
What I had with him was love in effigy, a crude imitation worthy of only being burned.
“You’ve become the most important part of my life.
“You want a lot.” “Just you.”
The other one is upstairs, filling my house, which used to be so empty; hell, lonely, with the sound of her happiness.
This is everything I’ve missed, and my body laps at it like a starved stray, taking not one drop for granted.
“I love her and it feels like the strongest thing I’ve ever had. At the same time, it feels like the most fragile.”
Life is indiscriminately seasoned, usually not sweet without some bitter. Usually not sun without some rain.
“Mama always said waiting for sunsets was like waiting for a miracle you knew would come,” he says, his voice graveled with the emotion in his eyes. “How happy she must be to know I finally found mine.”
If I were white, I could capture the world.
“Neevah, I’ve never wanted anything more than I want a life with you,” I say, swallowing the heat of my emotion. Nothing I’ve achieved, lost, won, compares to this moment with her.
You are worth these tears. You deserve more than all that’s in my heart, but I’m offering it to you for the rest of my life.”
But she’s perfect for me. She’s the only one who could have coaxed me from those shadows, back out to love again, because the rareness of her makes any risk worth it. Even risking my heart. The urgency of our love, of her life, forces me to pause and to savor. To appreciate life beyond my work.
It’s the rhythm of you, me, you, me, you, me. It’s the heartbeat of forever.
