My Love is Worn Like Map Paper — Part Two

Continued from Part One…

Grandpa Hank

Sixteen years before that I was sitting in my living room. Sesame Street was on. My sister and I had snacks, we were content. Even to the background of our parents heavy footsteps, shouting, screaming, crying. I don’t think it phased us much. Not even when my father stormed downstairs and put his raincoat and hat on and left without so much as a goodbye. My mother followed shortly after with two black garbage bags in her hands. She instructed us to go into our room and fill the bags with our favorite things.

I sat in the backseat of our red station wagon, our luggage overwhelming me. We were driving across the Bay Bridge when I asked where my daddy was. My mom said we were going to go live somewhere else for a while, and that maybe we would see him soon. There was a green tupperware full of grapes between my knees. I still remember the smell of them. I remember the light shinning through my window, I remember squinting so much the hills turned into flatlands and the boats and houses disappeared. And when we arrived in Ohio a few days later, I remember meeting my great grandparents for what seemed like the first time. My grandfather was the first man I had lived with that didn’t yell, or throw things, or punch holes into walls or make my mother shrink inside of herself. I loved him immediately for this.

When he died I felt it. I remember knowing he was gone before my mother hung up the phone. It was a few years later. My parents had reconciled and we came back to California. She knelt down and put her hand on my arm. I looked away. He died of cancer. He told me I was his favorite, let me wear his hat when I drove with him in his pick up truck. He smiled with his whole body. But I hardly knew him at all.

The Man I Married

Nineteen years later I met my ex-husband. My grandmother had just died in front of me. I watched her take her last breath on her birthday. I watched as her body stiffened and my mother refused to let anyone move her for a while. I watched as the coroner came and took her away. Those are the parts of death that aren’t romantic and no one tells you about. But I watched it anyway and then I cried. Or maybe I cried the entire time.

But when I met him I didn’t cry. I laughed a lot. We drank wine and ate popcorn and watched every movie that had ever moved either of us. We were both waiting for something. I was waiting for my mother to recover from the shock of her boyfriend and mother dying in the same month. I was waiting to save enough money to move back to New York. He was waiting, possibly, to meet me. That’s what it felt like.

One night I called him, angry, sad, hurting. He told me to come over and bring wine. When I got to his place he had built a blanket fort in his room. It was the most childish thing I had ever seen and it made me love him.

Six months later he was climbing down into the subway tracks at West 4th street. People gasped, and cringed as he walked over electrical railings and over rat shit and jumped up on the platform I was standing on to tell me how much he despised me. A woman walked right up to him, the way New Yorkers do, and told him never to do that again. He told her to fuck off. He was a graffiti artist and crawling through tunnels was his second nature. I hated him that night. I married him anyway.

My First Love

Two years later I waited in warm water for his arrival. My body wasn’t mine. My body was God’s. I let go of every thing I had ever held on to that day. Every inch of pain I was feeling, everything anyone had ever told me. Every guilt-riddled thought and every mile I had walked. My midwife placed a tiny warm body on my back and I reached around to grab him. He was perfect. Bluish and covered with his previous existence. His father looked over at me in total amazement of what I had just done. We had agreed to ruin each other in order to make things work all because of this person no one knew yet. Who had just learned how to breathe right in front of us. That’s the agreement you can make sometimes when you feel compelled to hold on to something that never actually existed. You find reasons and excuses and precursors and submit to renewals. But it doesn’t stick. It can’t.

I used to think it was because I had been through too much with love. That maybe I was broken. Sometimes you have to drown a little before you learn to swim. I thought love was tangible. Something undeniable like a lemon seed in the back of the throat. But it’s just energy. It’s subtle and omnipresent. It’s just acceptance. You can’t hold it and therefore you can’t lose it. And it’s not yours to give or take or look for. It just exists in you. It always will.

Sometimes love is hard and unforgiving. Sometimes you’re reborn in its womb. But at thirty-one I can say very confidently that my love is sweet as honey.

I have hang-ups, I have baggage, I have scars — but I’ll make you smile.

I’ll make you cry, I’ll kiss your wounds and nothing you can say will scare me.