on love ..
“Loving, my girl. Just loving. But it is a sin that deserves Paradise as a reward.”
-Nedjma
He came to remind me I haven’t gone far…that the hunger that made a child of me hadn’t quieted with time. They always come to remind me, as if they serve no other purpose. I’d rather believe I’d gone as far as the sea, and they remind me I haven’t gone past the shallow bed of a still river.
I said I’d write of love, and always I end in the space of its antonym, of everything it is not. It teases me with drops, again I fall, again I abandon the idea that took me forever to arrive at, that I am woman enough to not be lacking anything…but in their sudden arrivals and unfair departures, I lack everything. I lose it all. Even the performance. Abandoned. For the wind of them, the minutes they offered, the intense presence, and then, the empty spaces they litter the city with, enough to color it all with a nostalgia that makes no sense, considering how long their absence lasts beside the presence they rationed you, you who took everything, multiplied it, and returned it to undeserving hands. You who took minutes of them and made novels of it, who had only the shutter of her eye and one meeting to make a film of. Were it not for your mind, they wouldn’t exist.
It is who I am, within the spaces of them. In the space of love, however passing, however ephermal and brief, the part of me, unknown to me, that enters, as much a stranger to me as she remains a stranger to them, makes me beg for more time. Why does it take that brief breath of love to see her? Where does she go, and why always for so long? With some of these men, there’s a version of me that rises, under their gaze, in the tender way they listen, in the relieved pain of an absence answered, the pause in waiting, a waiting I’ve lived in since the day I was born…she who comes to me, in the presence of them…why won’t she allow me the permanence of her company? What remains when they go, if not the woman that emerged with them? But she goes, when they go. Leaving me alone in a cafe, the chair beside me empty, wondering what was the point of it all. To taste love, to know how good it can be..to be awakened suddenly with touch, but why wake someone up who will be put to bed again in an hour? Why not leave them asleep?
Forugh Remind me.
Walk me to the southern end of time.
To piers and young gods with cones.
the idea of us—this world
in their pockets. Verses penned
on slips of paper they’ll lose
in the tidal run home. So we lived
and died in the minds of gods
who played for seven days
and left the world unmade.
So you lived and died in the mind
of a woman who did the same
and left you unwritten.
So I loved. Again I loved…at the end of a dark cafe, where the music was too loud and the coffee sat untouched, the two of us sank into a moment of life, a pause that promised a beginning. I could have held the moment longer, could have let him kiss me when he asked. But for reasons unknown to me, we were pulled from the depth of that evening too soon, the chance of us, “a train missed by a second.” I’d never leaned into a chance as much, never held it past my fear. But I carried it all the way through that night. I wanted him. He wanted me. Tell me then what happens, in the silence of two people who want?
In that promising silence, where does the promise go?
A woman’s kind of love is different. Eternally different. When their eye settles on you, when they choose you, it feels divine, permanent… everything romantic love isn’t. There’s no degrees of madness, no tempting tragedy that I go after in romantic love. They are too good to me, women are, and men…they give me the dose of suffering I crave for. They wound me, until I crawl back into a woman’s arm. I recover beside them, then return to the source of pain, over and over again. Women are still new to me. They don’t promise to hurt me, as men do; with them, there’s no sense of anticipation. They bring you into the present, and the experience leaves you feeling so full and holy afterwards. You leave them feeling like the chosen one, the way they hold you in their presence. Women exist in my life on their own, I don’t write chapters for them, I don’t pour poetry into their silences. There is only my own existence besides theirs, nothing to be fabricated, embellished, maddeningly desired. You ask and they respond. And in the absence of yearning, and the wantings answered, what is love?
