“I know that there is a way to love that frees. I know that there is a way to love that gives life. I know this even though I have not witnessed such love” - bell hooks, “Wounds of Passion”
On the phone with a girlfriend, she contemplates, “hetero love is complicated precisely because it is the default.” She was talking about heteronormative romantic relationship tendencies. Where people pick up the playbooks they were given and just run with them, no questions asked. I have always wanted to do things differently, queer the norms if you will. I’d say with varying degrees of fucking success, but that within itself would imply that I think of relationships as a finished final goal to achieve. That pinnacle of US romantic love, wedded bliss, 2.5 kids, a dog a cat a mortgage till death do we part. I have experienced endings ranging in scale of heartbreak. But it’s always been about the process. About the adventure. About learning how to love.
She couldn’t get the taste of him out of her mouth, out of her mind. She lay across crisp white bed sheets, imagining his hands caressing her skin again. She traced her fingers across her breasts. Grazed her hand along her inner thighs. Imagined his fingers and his lips in their place. She couldn’t scrub the memory of his mouth tasting between her legs. Over and over. Again and again. Prisoner to her own mind, she indulged in this piscean-dream world, envisioning their bodies as still intertwined. Connected and beating and sweaty and alive. She wanted joy flowing through her nervous system. She wanted to flood the sheets from his touch. She lay alone on her bed. Mouth wet.
I don’t see him anymore but I scroll through his photos online. An archive of Family. Maybe not even archive, more like living document. Not like this single mother and child household. My “little family”. But, Family. I see their beach trips and their holidays. Their celebrations. The public devotions. I feel a twinge. A momentary wash of jealousy floods down my body. Suddenly, a want for something I have never had. Social media has fucked us all I tell myself. I look again at the pretty pictures knowing they are not the full story. That all of our online lives are a curated fucking experience. I look again. It still hurts.
He bounded across the parking lot toward her the first time they met. He exuded a confidence that shook her. What right did he have to be that confident? Male privilege still astounded her, made her reckon with her own imposter syndrome, her insecurities, the great gifts bestowed upon her from Patriarchy. The last date she had gone on a man had looked her up and down twice over then said he had to go. She felt a deep understanding with the women she knew who after decades of sleeping with men, decided to only fuck other women after they hit the age of 40. She got it. She was almost there. But he bounded over to her full of bde. He didn’t look her up and down. He just smiled and looked her in the eyes.
I don’t know exactly how we love in a way that “gives life”. I mean, I try to. God, I fucking try. I have made a trail of mistakes along the way. I am not the only one. I do know it is a daily practice. To take ownership for our feelings. To know yourself, to respect boundaries. Accountability is a practice. How to be intentional, to center decisions and actions and words in love. This is not easy shit, this practice of loving people to thrive. I have seen my fair share of horrid examples in my life of what it means to hold adult romantic relationships. I see a lot of pain. People concealing who they are. Lying. Lots of lying. At 41, I see no greater purpose than to center my life with love and care. So, I try. I know I don’t want to own or to be owned. I don’t want to stifle and I don’t want to be controlled. I, too, want love that frees. That connects. That is interdependent. Like my friends' love. Yet, it is an ongoing struggle of creation in romantic spaces. So many avoid the hard conversations. So many don’t want to do the work of accountability.
She had fucked dozens of men in her life, and if there was one thing she had learned, is that most men centered everything around their dicks. She recalled the shitty out-of-town poet she fucked on and off for a few years. The one who used to send her unsolicited dick pics when out camping, as though a floating cock attached to some pale legs in a tent were what she most ardently desired. She was a liar back then too. “Oooooh, this makes me so hot.” She never came with him. She remembered that one time he flew up to visit her in her little red house. They were on her bed making out when he burst up in a sudden rage. He couldn’t get hard! He left her alone on that bed and walked out to her patio to sulk over his soft cock. Everything was about his dick, even his shitty poetry. Not this lover though. This one seemed to delight in relentless pursuit of her pleasure. She came a thousand times over.
I think of those dudes who say shit like “Whose pussy is this?” The ones who get hot on dominating and owning that box. No wonder we have an entire political party and beyond hell-bent on the domination of this nation's pussies. The colonization of sex. The ongoing oppression of people’s sexuality. I interrogate myself. I try to do it with compassion. How can I love freely? How can I be loved? I know love as spirit, love, as source. I know it does not stem from my material desires. It is not composed from the greediness of my body. It is not created from my mess of an ego. So how can I love to give life? I try now to practice hard conversations and holding space for discomfort. This world is literally burning. Only love will save any of us. Will save anything.
She never thought it would last too long. The moment she met him she had already decided that. She had preconceived ideas about who or what this person would be. Insert labels and whatnot here. She was wrong though. That’s the thing that happens when you actually see someone. When you just witness them. The universe exposed her once again to her own judgments and biases and assumptions. She was so wrong. She tossed and turned across the sheets, images flashing, haunting her. Her favorite memories of them together, the mornings she had woken up in his arms. Their bodies awaking one another with desire. Half asleep she opened her eyes as she felt him pull her into his body, pressing hard against her. Her mouth watered, her pussy wet for wanting. She wanted to be . She wanted to be . She wanted to be.