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“That’s everything because that means I’m good to you and you’re good to me. Being good to you means wanting what’s best for you. If there is an upper hand, baby, I don’t want it. I know I’m asking you to take a big risk, but all I can do is promise that I’ll never try to hurt you and I’ll do everything to protect you. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you don’t regret choosing me and I’ll protect your dreams as fiercely as I chase my own.”
I’m on the cusp of everything I’ve been working toward in my career, and I realize that acknowledging those parts of me that want care and companionship doesn’t make me less whole. It doesn’t mean I’m not happy, but that this is something else that can make me happy.”
This is what most women dream of. A handsome billionaire to sweep them off their feet and whisk them away. I’m equal parts thrilled… and slightly terrified. I went from not even sure I’d give him a real chance last night to us spending the next week together? This is fast. Not just our plans, but what this feels like. How solid and anchored things seem between us already. My heart pulls me forward, racing ahead with a recklessness that kind of scares me. My head says slow things down.
“Of course I helped Sol,” I say. “She’s my girl.” “And you’re mine.”
“August West finally did it.” Mr. Bell’s tone is begrudgingly admiring. “He earned it, but we coming for that crown next season.”
“And Kenan Ross did it,” Maverick says. “Got him a piece of the team.”
Strength is not always control. Sometimes it’s surrender.”
“No, not giving up—accepting. Accepting that you can’t control a wave, so you ride it. You set aside the idea that things will go exactly as planned. In a situation like this, they never do.”
“The plan is love. It’s the no matter how bad it gets or how much I want to run, I’ll stay kind of love. I’ve watched you over this last week, and have heard how you talk about your friends and the people in your life. You have the capacity for that.”
When life deals you the worst hand, the biggest test is how you get through it. Laugh, cry, wail, whine—doesn’t matter.
And how this whole situation is a runaway train welded to the tracks with an inevitable crash looming. I’m being crushed. I’m already under the charging mammoth metal of this diagnosis. Trapped and being dragged beneath the wheels of an unavoidable conclusion to my mother’s life. It’s slow, but unrelenting. I’m tied to the tracks and hypnotized by the lights. It all comes crashing down and the tears are a deluge.
“Bible say the love of money is the root of all evil, not money itself. So just do the right things with what you got.”
Are there words in the lexicography of human emotion for how it feels to lose the love of your life? It’s articulated in wails and tears, in the impenetrable loneliness that comes with losing such a vital part of who you are. Your person, closer than anyone to you, is now irretrievable, beyond reach. A mourning with no sunrise. You never know what to say when faced with that kind of devastation. I’ve learned to say nothing at all. No platitude or condolence could make it any better. All I can do is be human enough to listen and try to understand.
God said Hendrix will need somebody, and saved the fiercest, sweetest, most badass women on the lot for me. I found them later in life, but I found them and I’m never letting go.
Faith has always seemed to come easily to Mama and Aunt Geneva, and to their mother before them. They passed it onto me like a wedding dress every woman in our family eventually wore. Once it got to me, though, it needed to be let out or taken in. Something about the way it lay against my beliefs and rationales never quite fit. I’ve often wondered how I can make this garment that has always brought them so much peace, mine. When I’m more helpless and confused than I’ve ever felt, could it ever suit me? Could it help me?
Because sometimes it feels like new emotions were invented for this thing that has blossomed between the two of us. I’m not sure how to name it, and it’s articulated only in the pace of my heart when I think of him. In the hitch of my breath when I first see him. In the thrum of home, home, home beneath every second we’re together. Of course, we’ve said we love each other, but that feels inadequate. Almost cliché.
More and more, the present is becoming a foreign, fractured world of strangers. The past is familiar. The love of her life is there, alive and hale. Whole. Frozen in their best days. Is it selfish to keep trying to drag her back here? Are we the comfort? Or are we the ghosts? Having seen that fresh devastation in her eyes, I’ll never tell her again. The truth is not the most important thing. Her peace is.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mama. When those footsteps disappear, that’s me carrying you. I will never leave you alone or in the dark by yourself. Okay?”
Loving someone this way feels like giving them a blank check and telling them they can fill it up with zeros. That there is no limit, but that’s how I feel when I’m with Hendrix.
“But these two women are just as much my soulmates. They have been with me through the toughest times of my life. They have never wavered and have taught me what true friendship, what real sisterhood means. I thank you.”
“I want my love to be the most extravagant gift I ever give you,” he whispers, his voice deep and reverent. “I want it to be outrageously unconditional. I want it to overflow and spill into every crevice of your life, every corner of your heart because that’s what you do for me. You overwhelm me, Hendrix.”
