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“Baby love. Love doesn’t protect you from those things. Love only heals from the damage. Love ensures you don’t go to battle alone. But with great love comes notable risk. With the fall. With the glide. Comes the impact.”
Then I prepare. I brace for what’s to come. Succumb to my destiny. I accept the memory. Because in the end, I would have rather gone up on that parachute with you than remained on the ground with anyone else.
“Promise me you’ll do whatever you need to be happy. If for any reason I’m not here to make you happy...promise me, you’ll still find a way to be.”
“Tahli doesn’t want me to fight for her. She wants to marry the perfect nigga that never fucks up–” “I didn’t give her to the perfect nigga!” Robert surprised him by bellowing, commanding Vin’s gawk. “I gave her to you. So, if you’re the man that you said you were...the man that I think you are... you’ll fight for her.” That rendered Vin speechless. “If- No, when…she makes it through this. You better do just that.” “Do what?” Vin dared for clarity, and Robert met his glower. “Fucking fight for her, Dalvin.”
“So, yeah…I’m fucking with it. I love you, baby. But I owe it to myself to love me more. Don’t think that doesn’t kill me to say, Vin, because of course what the fuck am I gonna do without you?”
“It kills me to see you broken. But I want you to love me enough to let me go, baby.” Vin looked like he had stopped breathing. “I want off the parachute.”
Because if you’re reading this, you’re not my wife anymore. But you’ll always be my parachute.
‘Grief is the price we pay for love’. Sometimes you have to let the pain run its course.”
“If you love Tahli, truly love Tahli…you have to love her past the capacity of your possession. You have to love her enough to want her happy; however she finds that happiness. She’s a smart woman. She’ll know if you love her enough for that.”
“And I don’t even blame you…because no one should have that much control over someone else’s happiness. But we were supposed to be the exception,” she rattled off, mind groggy and filter waning. “We were supposed to be each other’s parachutes.”
Turning around and calling black women masculine when they’re actually the biggest nurturers. But
Don’t ever let somebody else’s words define you. You’re beautiful. You’re smart. You’re perfect.”
“Like you said, ever since he was born, I handled him wrong. He was my seed like any other and I should’ve been honest with everyone, so I didn’t give him scraps of myself. As much as I hate how I hurt you, Tahli, I hate what I did to him more. Because you and I both know what happens in our childhoods is so delicate. It shapes us forever.
Like you said once, sometimes we don’t get to keep the loves of our lives, but it doesn’t diminish shit.
“You always say that our souls don’t die…that energy gets transferred and all of that shit
you learned from your Moms. Well, I hope it’s true, baby love. If we get to do this again, I swear to God, Tahli, I’ll come find you. I won’t fuck up the next time.”
“I love you, baby. I really fucking do. That’s why I can’t let you hurt like this while you try to forgive me.”
“Pain is a scary son of a bitch, Tahli. People do all kinds of shit to escape the burn. But you can’t run from that motherfucker. You gotta sit in it. Then it starts to dissipate. But the thing is, you’ve tried everything but sitting in it. You gotta sit in it. Then you can truly forgive Dalvin. And you must forgive him. Not for him. Respectfully, fuck him. This ain’t about him. You gotta forgive him for you. So, you can let that pain you’ve been walking around with, go. Then you see what you’re left with. Then you see how you move on from there. That’s it. It don’t get no fucking simpler than
...more
To deem someone flawed suggests that you believe they have deviated from perfection. But there is no perfection. People are people.
He said when a boy really likes a girl, it’s not about money, it’s about effort. That the boy becomes obsessed with making the girl smile.”
“That’s why I had to let you go. If we were ever going to have a shot at forever. But I wasn’t going anywhere. You were gonna go and I was gonna stand right there until you found your way back.”
“I accepted that I fucked it all up because certain shit was never for me. I accepted that I lost you, as much as it gutted me to, because I deserved to feel that. Now you’re here with the house…and the kids… I wanna drop to my knees and thank God for his mercy, but I also don’t wanna get my fucking hopes up. I can’t keep losing you, baby love. I don’t know if I can survive another round of that shit.”
“Baby, we are so much alike,” she confessed, shaking her head. “We both handled our trauma in different ways…but ultimately, we never knew how to receive love fully. Me? I created expectations for love, knowing many wouldn’t be able to live up to them. Eventually, someone would make a mistake, and I’d never have
to worry about being abandoned. Because I would do the abandoning. “And you…you never felt you deserved the life you had. So, you gambled with it, then built a web of lies to hold onto it, terrified of me abandoning you. But we’re not there anymore. We’re here. With a power in knowing the past we’re up against…and knowing that shit doesn’t stand a chance against our parachutes.”
“Our house literally had to burn down, baby. So, we can rebuild it from the ashes.”
“But I said…I didn’t earn your love, but you gave it to me anyway. It wasn’t anything profound, but it was real. Tahli…I’m ready to earn your shit. Seed by seed.”
“She made me promise to give you all of the love that she never could.”
“He said one day you would try to run. But to promise him that I was man enough to chase you.”
“Those two combined? Talk about pressure. Don’t stop loving him. Don’t let that bitch run away,” Tahli mocked.
Their parachute had blown every which way, rocked by winds, and thrown into turbulence. But somehow, they survived the impact. They had landed safely.
Pregnant women didn’t give a fuck. They were deservingly selfish and mildly deranged.
“Because that’s what parachutes is about, Vin. Not just about saving us from the fall but saving us from the impact. When we’re crashing to the ground too fast to stop it, the parachute is there to do it. So we never die. Our love can’t die, Dalvin.”
For love, there is no ceiling on who is worthy and who it’s possible for. Through it all, I never doubted your love for those you allow yourself to love and allow to love you in return.
