Black Number Four

by Kandi Steiner

“Can we stop talking about penis fly traps for like two seconds? This is serious!”

“I’ve got a really bad case of the Blue Bean, ladies. A major Violet Vulva.”

And that’s the thing about scars. They’re like skid marks on the highway. No one slows down enough to see the painful proof that something happened. But the road? The road will always remember. The road can’t forget, no matter how many times it’s repaved.

“I’m beginning to think as long as you’re in it, I don’t really care what happens anymore.”

Love is like the wind, someone once told me, because it’s felt and not seen. But I think you actually can see it. You see love just the same way that you see the wind – by the way it moves other things. Love has moved me, it’s changed me, and I can see it more clearly than the sun in the sky.

But remember, some of life’s best experiences are masked as terrifying leaps of faith.

Love doesn’t care about the games we play. It doesn’t care about the rules or the players or what’s at stake. Love is wild and unruly and it does what it wants with our hearts without us having any say in it. It’s beautiful and paralyzing and breathtaking. And it kills us because it’s the only thing that keeps us alive. Love doesn’t play our games because love is a completely different game in and of itself. And in the game of love, when all the chips are on the table, no one emerges unscarred. No one.