To Love Is To Come Into Intimacy With Grief

Notes from my journal on the complex and beautiful fuckery of falling in love: Fall 2021

From my journal: 10.16.21

“You must be in love.” my beloved best friend said in response to a photo I texted her, “You look younger. People in love always look younger”. 

“I most certainty and entirely am” I replied, shy grin on my face and all the hope in the world in my heart. 

And I am, in absolute fact, in love.

Maybe my history demands more caution, less trust. But that’s not how I work, or at least that’s not how this love thing works. 

And so yes, am in love with her. 

Knew it weeks before she said it to me that night, in that hushed and reverent moment in the after, when our bodies were still entwined and coming back to earth together.

“What are you thinking?” I asked. 

And she was quiet. Hesitant. Her eyes searching mine and saying everything and nothing all at once.

Finally, long moments later, she answered.

I do not recall her exact words, but the core of her reply was that though she was thinking so very many things, almost all of them involved just how much she loved me. Or maybe it was just how in love she was with me. Or at least I think it was something like that.

I don’t know that the specifics matter, just the melting yes of my body, knowing it no longer had to build levees hold the emotion of my own giving over to the totality of us. 

And so, of course, I said I loved her too.

I had said it a few times before—as a human-to-human moment of “my god, you’ve come to matter so much to me” and as a friend turned lover “holy sweet fuck, I adore the person that you are”, But this time was different. 

This was both of us all in, and inside that moment, everything became possible. 

From My Journal: 11.12.21

“I am spending time these days contemplating how it is that feeling the goodness of love can bring up so much deep grief”. 

I texted this to my dear friend Morgan Wade, in the throes of a moment of existential love-related angst.

Morgan, wise one that she is, texted right back.

“Um, dude - because trauma. Because love fills in the gaps that have been hollow for so long and it’s like a flood in a long-thirsty riverbed…that love brings to the surface and carries up and away all the debris of loss that have been gathering for lifetimes. It’s this bittersweet churning over of earth to the dark rich underground”. 

Yes, because it’s not just this love. It’s all the love we wanted and didn’t get. All the love we once held in our hands and between our lips and bit into with our teeth and still somehow lost. All the love we held and fucked up along the way. 

All the hope. All the wounding. All the longing. All the lonely.  All the fear. 

Love is a portal to so much beauty and so much grief all at once, if we let it be…

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