My Love is Worn Like Map Paper — Part One
A Black Love Story
First, an affirmation.
At thirty-one I can say very confidently that my love is sweet as honey.
Rich like red dirt.
New like water gathered at the tips of grass blades.
Subtle like tendrils at the nape of a neck.
I have hang-ups, I have baggage, I have scars (both literal and figurative), I keep track of silly shit sometimes, but I’ll make you smile. I’ll make you cry, I’ll kiss your wounds and nothing you can say will scare me. My love now is weathered and resilient and unmovable. But it was different before.
Ten years ago my love was a patchwork quilt of things I’d collected in childhood. When it was too heavy I put it down. When I ached for it, I picked it back up. I searched for love in rooms I didn’t belong in. I loved men of all kinds, left them — usually cold and without warning — found them, pulled them apart, licked their wounds and put them back together again. I deconstructed love by devouring it. In no particular order.
Hello Brooklyn
I sat beside him at the Promenade, new and wide-eyed. Our bellies full of fruit, our cheeks swollen with laughter. Wine fresh on our tongues. Everything we did and said was in jest. One long afternoon of flirtation that was spilling over from the night before. We’d met at a house party. His house party. We made horrifyingly strong drinks for people through a haze of slow motion and crept into quiet corners to dissect bits and pieces of each other to line our pockets with. He begged me to spend the night with him after everyone left, but my cab was waiting.
It was a brief love affair. It existed in long nights out and gallery shows and hushed drunk sex in a houseful of room mates. I wore his t-shirt home one morning. One night we took a cab ride from a woman who thought we were in love. We told her we were and laughed about it in bed later. There was nothing about us that was permanent and it was perfect that way.
The Fiancé
Six months before that I was laying in bed with my fiancé. Our nightly routine was completed — dinner at Everett & Jones, sex in the living room to the light of a half watched episode of The Wire, brushed teeth, clean faces, warm covers. His nose was in a book, my mind was in another place altogether. I announced quickly and without eye contact or apology, that I was going to move to New York in three months. I knew he would be hurt, angry, abandoned. I knew he would support it, drive me to the airport, kiss me goodbye. Hate me, love me, need and not need me — all at once. Because that’s who he was. That’s who we were together. We were so simple it made people feel like they knew us their whole lives, like he and I were born together. No one could quite understand why it ended. But we did.
I took the 7 AM flight. A one-way ticket was purchased and my things were following via long-haul delivery. I had an apartment and a room mate in Brooklyn waiting. I was a California girl with no idea what I was stepping into. He waved goodbye, his warmth left my skin and that was it. My freedom was sealed. The flight was long so I drank three rum and cokes. I watched two movies and read part of a W magazine. A woman sitting next to me struck up conversation.
“Business or pleasure?”
“Neither. Both I guess.”
I realized for the first time that I wasn’t even sure why I was leaving everyone I had ever met and moving across the country to a place I had never been, with no job, no prospects for a job, a few thousand dollars to my name and an old college friend waiting at the gates at JFK. I didn’t know why I did this then. But I soon found out.
A Hundred Tiny Cuts
Four years prior I stood beside him. He was tall. Extremely tall. He dwarfed me and made me feel like a child. He spoke to me like I wasn’t there and this satisfied something inside of me. I knew when he came home some nights that he’d been with another woman. I could smell it on his skin, something about the way he would walk into our room and start talking immediately — as if he needed to fill the silence that he normally wouldn’t even notice. He changed that year. After he went away and once he got out, he was different. I heard rumors that he may have killed someone from his old neighborhood. I didn’t want to believe it. I met him when I was 17 and still so fresh and shy. He used to bring me chocolate and carnations.
But he wasn’t that guy anymore. He was someone else. One night he put a gun in my hands. Told me to hide it, stashed a bag of money into a backpack and left. I found out later he had robbed the drug dealer next door. I wasn’t surprised anymore. I wanted to believe he was still the guy I met so long ago outside that place with the bomb chimichangas. Who introduced me to his mother and shook my grandma’s hands. Who wrote to me when he went away to college in Atlanta. Then the letters stopped. When they started back up they had a different rhythm, they had an ID number and a state prison address.
And one night he lost his mind. Smashed my car window with his hands, me inside. I ran from him. He chased me down the street, screaming that he was going to kill me. I stumbled into a Hollywood Video store and asked to use the phone. The manager looked at me, his face dropped and turned grey.
“Should I call the police?”
I tried to pretend I had no idea what he was talking about. I didn’t notice my entire hand and forearm was bleeding from hundreds of tiny shards of glass. I looked down at the blood and walked out.
It may seem vein and small, but I didn’t care about the cheating, or who he shot for stealing his car. I cared that he might leave me scarred. That my brown arms might forever be left with his markings. I called the police, filed a restraining order, packed his shit and placed it in front of the apartment. I sold his car. I eventually left town.
