The House Love Built & Fear Destroyed
(listen here for the playlist accompanying this essay)
The intimate liminal space between the knowing and the end. We sense the tide coming in to claw back the love lying on the shores of our tethered fears. We are entangled and unraveling. Our world is collapsing but the sidewalks lining the streets outside continue to catch quick pedestrian steps, capturing the inordinate pace of the world outside — life goes on. At home, in our bubble, the creak of a wooden beam releasing itself from expectation mediates our argument, forcing us to pause, the end is imminent, the beginning is ancient history; the breaking point is now. The unsteady frame of our home is wavering and buckling beneath the unspoken affirmations, missed connections, and self righteous soliloquies.
We have dismantled our home, built it on quicksand, and sawed through the frame to protect the words left unsaid. Love lingers on the edge of our tongue but we shut our mouths rather than let our heart speak in place of our fear. We lay a blanket on our sinking foundation and settle together beneath the crown of our home looking through the shattered skylights imagining, conjuring what could’ve been. A home that love built and fear destroyed. Together we travel across our memories riding the rise of our laughter into the plateaus of our deflating chests as we recapture our breath. The blueprints we created together were brilliant, cozy, and extraordinary, walls made of tenderness decorated with our shared deep love of language and furnished with a delicate touch.
The walls aren’t so tender anymore, we’ve had to reinforce them with concrete where the cracks split open, we built our nest on quicksand. We always knew our love nest was never a permanent home but the end was always tomorrow. We always thought tomorrow would be slow to come, hours ticking by slowly and rhythmically lulling us to forget that our love was urgent and fleeting. We were Love Jones, we were Darius and Nina, pleading “this here, right now, at this very moment, is all that matters to me. I love you. That's urgent like a motherfucker.” Then tomorrow came. The sand was calm and relentless as it wrapped its rough compacted sediment around us, consuming us, feeding on our love as we succumb to our anticlimactic demise.
Our love was poetry, we embodied onsra, a Boro word meaning ‘to love for the last time, the bittersweet knowledge that love soon ends.” To love you was to relinquish timelines, to smell the rose without capturing its scent, distilling it into a perfume bottle. To listen to you was to eavesdrop on Stevie Wonder’s studio sessions, witnessing the makings of ‘Songs in the Key of Life’— our life. To be granted entrance and a place in your dreams has been a privilege, the worn ticket lingers in my hand as time erodes our memories severing our tether.
The tide has retreated, the end is over, what held us together is transformed into separate, divergent new beginnings. Rising to my first steps without you feels bittersweet like the first licks of an ice cream cone before it becomes an offering to the sidewalk that once caught our synced strides during evening strolls. Recovering from you, from us, requires a transformative personal alchemy that our love taught me. I am better for having known you. Though I wish tomorrow never came, I’m happy the universe honored its word to return the sun in the mourning. What we crafted wasn’t enough to sustain us but it was a sweet treat that we snuck in before dinner arrived, a secret we kept. A knowing smile always creeps across my lips when memory recalls you back to me. You will always satisfy my sweet tooth.
Our makeshift shelter erected in honor of our love remains in memory a piece of art. Loving you was an art, each brushstroke intentional, the lessons remain on my paintbrushes, flowing across my canvas. The art I create after you will be fearless and for that I thank you.