I Was Born For An Extraordinary Love
I have known it so many times before. And as long as I am alive I will know it again, and again, and forever again.
I have told you this so many times. As I continue to devote myself to this task of braiding strands of language into story it is likely that I will tell you so many times more…
In this life I have been so very well-loved.
I have been loved in ways that the present was memory and the past became now. In the bendiness of time where a lover whispered lilting Spanish in my ears from a makeshift bed in a turquoise shack, where the gaps in the rough-hewn slats offered glimpses of an azure sea. Loved so that the plaintive echo of open train cars filled with the baking heat and fine dust of the African plains crossed lines with frigid hands encased in delicate kid leather on the way to a Chicago masquerade ball on a winters night in the roaring twenties. So that all of these lived simultaneously in the body of me—the impossible somehow made real and the finite meeting infinity—all in the space of a brief window of stolen hours in a hotel room above the city.
I have been loved as groundwater and mother tongue. In the way one is changed, forever, by the act of being known, loved exactly as one is without a solitary demand to be anything but that. Splayed open and raw from the art and the act of her hands and mouth and heart and witnessing. The wholeness and goodness of me seen and honored in a sort of fullness that can never be taken from me, no matter what is to come. The story of us typed on scraps of paper and scrawled on coffee shop napkins, tied with a black silk ribbon, and tucked into a cigar box that somehow expands to hold an entire mythology.
I have been loved in ways that broke down binaries and propriety and even my own integrity. Loved under the banner of secrecy demanded because they deemed my loving deviance and pathology. Opened my body and my heart and my soul to the loving of more than one person at a time and in shared space. Loved in the harsh claiming of my own experience at the expense of another. Loved in a way that was need, was want, was holy-god-grant-me-mercy-i-have-to-have, where that having was the beginning and end of all that was and still only a hint at what would be.
I have been loved with the naïveté of youth, in the way you can only love in those few years before you have tasted the bitter tang of loss chosen from a certain undeniable necessity. I have been loved in the whitewashed country church and the “where you go I will go” vows and the promises of a forever that exist only in reality that has not yet shown you all it knows of loopholes and broken contracts. I have been loved in the creation of life and collateral damage of an ending nobody saw coming—through the choice to break my own heart as the one and only way I could save my own life.
I have been loved in shared origin stories, so that a brief smile delivered over the top of that Battleship game board offered a glimpse of one truth—where she began and where I began was the same exact same place, somehow. And even though the story did not have a clear through-line, it managed to weave a tapestry of weak threads into a connection that, for a time, was an entire everything. And even now, despite the ways the paths diverged, irreparable harm done & current iterations of us forever by necessity distant, I can still trace my way back to that shared space. I know that nothing but beauty lives there.
I have been loved in the way of words traveling across vast distance. Where my language and hers mingled with the poetry of others such that though one could never be quite sure what came from where, it was only clear that the entirety of us was a story being written. And that in that act of creation there was an unwriting too, of past hurts and future projections. And in this way, the larger story itself was healed, and holes were patched, leaving us room to launch an expedition of bodies and deep care and holy want to discover where it exactly was that the words came from. And when we did (as we knew we would) to build an altar there and worship.
I have been loved in the sliver of space where pleasure becomes pain which alchemizes into pleasure again, magic made real by the incantation of flesh. Where the taking and the giving serpentine spiral into an ouroboros of alchemy and renewal, consuming itself to be born again.
I have been loved with so much safety that I learned to hold the whole of my control only by opening to the heart of my infinite surrender. So that freedom was delivered in the act of the binding and the doing was the undoing was the delivery I sought. Where my sin was my confession and my penance, both. Where my born-again-child-of-the-goddess-baptism was the current of desire itself.
I have been loved in the way of a wish granted before it was knowingly cast. A love that felt, for the briefest of moments, like everything beautiful in this world was made real in the space where her skin met mine; every touch a shooting star, every word a lucky penny thrown into the fountain of me. The genie, the lamp, the silk of my skin, the grit of her voice, our shared deliverance—these are the plot points of which I am entirely sure. So that this, even in the harshest and most unexpected end, and all the breaking that came to be, still lives on as a love that gifted me back my own vanquished forever.
I have been loved in ways that can only be told to you as homecoming. And I don’t mean home as analogy or metaphor, where we bend language to mean something more poetic than it actually is. What I mean is that the cadence of her heartbeat spun a siren song and when I nestled my head against her chest for the first time I watched our love become the cartographer of a map to the place we had been unknowingly seeking and wanted deeply to stay. Loved like stumbling on the oasis after 20 years of wandering arid lands, kneeling with our mouths to the pool of every last unlikely hope we still held despite our worst fears. Where we drank our fill, each consuming the other as an act somewhere between prayer and spell.
I have been loved in a way that can only be described as epic, and yes, I choose that word with deliberation, despite every damn cliche it may bring to your mind. Loved like an unexpected desert thunderstorm under the waning crescent of a September moon. The earth of me parched and ready to soak up all that was offered when we fell on each other, monsoons of pent-up longing that waited endless months for release. When lightning hit ground and ran up through the bodies of us, leaving us existing inside a force field, where invisible lines of energetic current bound her to me and back again. Loved inside an endless circuit conducting enough illumination that the dark shadows of shame were left—for a moment that was also an entire forever—without a single, solitary place to hide.
I have been loved so that I was made somehow more real in the flash of intensity that can only exist in the center of that which lives when all but us was obliterated by desire. I have been loved in the marks left on translucent flesh, where the blue of my veins runs just beneath the surface and the bruise that rose to meet her hands and mouth were my sacrament and my redemption, the sounds of my pleasure a hallelujah choir.
I have been loved in verses of scripture and stanzas of poetry and lines of philosophy gifted with the close of her teeth, inked on ribs, claimed and reclaimed from the bones of me. I have been loved so that I wanted to play the long game after years of forfeiting my space on every team. Loved so that the endless river of me exhaled into a welcoming sea and the ocean of her returned again and again to my shore.
I have been loved in a sort of hazy reality that became its own living myth. So that it seems entirely possible for me to believe that one day the grandmothers will tuck their children into their beds at night and point up at the heavens and whisper to them that the tales of these love stories are painted across the cosmos in light from distant, long-dead stars.
And no. By the wider cultural notions of happily ever after, none of those love stories ended well. And by this I mean only that they have each, in their own way, ended. That even when they did not meet a finite and definable end, or when I still find myself making offerings to the darkness for a different sort of story—they have shifted trajectory and form and shape, becoming something different than they once were or maybe, possibly, that they might have been.
We live in a world that would still—despite all evidence to the contrary—have us believe that the only good love story is one that continues, persists, sustains in singular and unchanging form. Till death do us eternally part.
And so no. By that definition, none of these loves have lasted. By that notion, then, none of these love stories are “good” love stories.
And yes, by any definition, each of these endings has left me scared and aching. Bargaining with a brutal narrator to please deliver a more gentle plot twist. To rewrite the ending so that there is a sunset that we walk into together, or a white horse to ride off on, or the closing kiss while the end credits roll.
However, this is my year of working to learn the art of telling a true story. I know well there is no way to write a true story about love without telling you that the bones of my body—of all of our bodies—are etched with hieroglyphics of heartbreak. That the shadowlands of me hold caves built to keep the wolves out, walls carved with ancient symbols for endings and breaking, and the inevitability of letting go.
To have lived the writing of great love stories is also to live the writing of no small amount of losing.
I am so sorry, but I don’t know any way around the truth of this.
In the face of the most recent loss, still in the space of erasing imagined scenes hopefully penciled in on pages not yet lived. Unwinding the relentless absence of what was and might have been—with a grief that guts me from the inside out—I find myself reflecting a lot on love.
And as I do, I continue to arrive at a bittersweet truth:
In all of my reflections I do not land and rest on the end scenes, but on the existence of the entirety of the stories themselves.
If my life is a library, and as a writer one might say that it is, I can return to my memories and pull volume after volume off the shelf, flip the pages, and easily land on a love story.
Let me tell you, for all the breaking and loss tucked into the lines of these stories, all the wounds left in the wake of their leaving, or my own. All the epic sagas chronicling battles fought and lost along the way. All the bodies left for dead along the wayside and the collateral damage scarring the landscape.
In spite of all of this, there is one thing that is clear in the way I choose to write of love: This heart of mine is one hell of a tenacious and stubbornly optimistic mother fucker.
When this life of mine winds its way toward the end, when the stories of my living are done being written and recorded. When there is no longer time to edit in the name of creating a cleaner arc or a softer narrative. When all the saying is said and all the doing is done. When I am asked what I have known of love in this life, I do not believe I will tell you stories of heartbreak.
When I cast a net around all of the loves I have known in this life. All the hearts I have bravely held in my bare and shaking hands.
All the bodies I have tasted as day deepened into night and as sunrise cast the shadows into sweet relief.
All the ways I have been opened, the versions of me made and unmade.
All the methods I have used to make meaning and myth from the connection and dissolution.
When I look at these not as a collection of disparate stories but as a collective of my own knowing, one thing is still entirely true.
At the end I will tell you what I told you at the beginning of this story and countless times before: In this life, I have been so very well loved.
But, you see, I am not yet at the end of my life. Nor am I done with loving. And because of this, for the loves I have lived and am living and have yet to live, all things remain possible.
Yes. I was born for extraordinary love.
For love that rewrites time and space and that makes the impossible possible.
For love that dismantles and deconstructs and demolishes all that stands between me and the truth.
For love that holds the keys to the cage, that bends the bars, that opens the whole of us to a wide open sky.
For love that builds and guides and illuminates.
For love that speaks in the language of bodies and the words known only to the blood that pulses in our veins.
For love that is myth and metaphor and that makes its own meaning.
For a love that calls me home and holds me there, no matter how many times we both may wander.
Yes, I am here for the most extraordinary love.
I have known it so many times before.
And yes, as long as I am alive I will know it again, and again, and forever again.
And I will tell these stories, and shift them and morph them and blend them together to tell them again.
Because in this way, each love story will live forever. And, after all, forever is how we know to measure love.
Everything I write is richer, deeper, and more true when it includes the voice of the collective and becomes a piece of the community. What do you know to be true of love for you? Leave a comment and join the discussion.
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