The House Love Built - Trilogy
Part 1
The House Love Built and Fear Destroyed
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.
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Part 2
Love Resurrected
“…a core foundation of a loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception.” - bell hooks (All About Love)
You are my final ego death. I now welcome the tide clawing back the love lying on the shores of our once tethered fears. The embers of Palo Santo erase the fragments of you nestling in my memory. I stroll alongside the ancestors clearing the smoke and mirrors of your deceit. You used to walk alongside me, always in the footsteps of the tyrants before you. I never noticed those worn grooves until I took my first steps without you. The sands that consumed us now fill the spaces of your gaits imprint. Our end was really your end. Our love was really the dream of trauma.
Fear did not destroy the house love built, awakening from imagination did. The shattered mirrors once hanging in our home reflected a vision too sharp to grasp. The cool breeze of our late spring meeting made your stuffy airs bearable. The weight of hope quelled the lies dripping from your tongue, your recitation of facts curated in the image of your reality. Litigation excised a love that has left a beauty mark on you though you insist on long sleeves now, even as we begin a new spring apart. Always protecting, always hiding, always distant.
Your ego insisted intent where impact bore a hole. Your insecurity lay over my pain, quieting me with fables where you are the prey and I am the predator, I believed you. Your eloquent melodies were the soundtrack to our slow dance into oblivion. As the walls of our love returned to dust I was sure they would settle onto our roots. I was sure they would become soil for a new season breathing blooms. Conjured ideas always feel sure within the worlds of our mind. You were never a sure inhale, steady exhale, or safe space to meditate; your words a constant objection, your actions at war. Love waited, gently and patiently. Love opened the door to a mourning sunrise as you lingered behind. Willfully confined to the familiarity of chaos, you’d rather write epics of your imagined heroism than awaken.
I’ve cleansed the brushes carrying the painted lessons from you soaked in its fibers. A voyeur to the paint wrapping its love inordinately across the canvas, I learned the lessons were never about you. The home house we built can never be destroyed for I am love resurrected —I am the home love built. I learned to trust the concrete I meticulously poured was cured and stable to create from. I learned an offering of marigolds to a warring soul finds a closed fist where open palms should be. I learned a false self always suffers stage fright when presenting beneath the eye of authenticity. I learned a future predicated on warm vanilla scented hugs, grins pried open with tender words, and reaching shoulders calmed by steady touch is not a forgone conclusion unless one is willing to begin again.
And so, here I meditate on all that I know.
The earth runs through my hands as I prepare space and plant new seedlings that will mature into nourishment. A pen callouses my middle finger as I deposit ink onto the page dyed from the wisdom of evidence. The misshapen shack containing what was is laid to rest, tucked into a subterranean slumber no longer at war trying to withstand the weathering. The grounds catching my pace give way now, no longer stopped by the hardened asphalt of false hopes limitations. I am welcomed back home, to the house love resurrected.
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Part 3
Truth Be Told
What if I told you the truth? Carefully, judiciously, and tactfully. What if you had told me the truth? Earnestly, intentionally, and thoughtfully.
To tell the truth is to shame the devil — so the elders say. Though the devil I know bears no shame at all. Telling the truth has showered me in shame, soaking me to the bone, anchoring my anxiety.
Be honest but don't tell the truth.
Where do I begin my story, how do I tell the truth? What is the truth? How can people who’ve never faced truth tell me about honesty? How can they have loved me when they’ve never met me?
I defer my truth until it is safe, you withhold your truth until I have earned it. How can love be defined by honesty when you love me and don’t know me? Am I my own heartbreak? I earned your ‘I love you’, I was steady, I was patient, I was kind. I was honest…enough. What a hollow love that turned out to be like my praying grandmother shielding my mother from safety. Grandma never told Mama ‘I love you’, I think she meant it. I think she told the truth. Mama said ‘don't wear your heart on your sleeve’, I didn’t listen. I didn’t trust that truth.
My Mama said I was too much after she said ‘I love you’. She taught me to pour water from my vase so my flower would shrink and be just the right size for someone else’s. She taught me truth is secondary, you have to survive first. She told me wearing truth is expensive and we can’t afford it. Truth was the pieces of her left over after the light bill was paid, after she put gas in the car, and food on the table. I learned to collect pieces of love and build a mosaic. I learned to make discomfort manageable, I learned to survive in ‘love’ just like my Mama did. It’s true but what’s the use in knowing? Knowing brings me to the feet of ancestors, knowing welcomed each version of Mama back to me, knowing brought me home to be seen, knowing allowed me to see you beyond the mask that grins and lies.
Did your Mama ever say she liked you after she said I love you? Does your curated white paper trail of degrees, accolades, and influential connections function well as evidence that you’re good enough and liked? You nor your truth seem impressed by it. You liked that I wasn’t enveloped by the paper trail though your cultivated self image rooted itself there in your struggling marriage to prestige. At onset, our meeting was fraught with irreconcilable differences cemented by the truth of the revolutionary within you deifying the beauty of settler kin. A litigator denouncing Virginia in pursuit of Loving. I wanted to know and excavate truth and you wanted to be a rhetorical orator and myth maker of truth. You were the first and only one to say ‘I love you’…religious folk say ‘the devil is a lie and the truth ain't in you’…or is it? I think it is.
Truth be told…
Truth be told…
Truth be told…
I am an emotional endurance athlete by force and a lover by sheer will. My resilience is birthed from endurance, a utility alchemized with curiosity that wrenches open joy and whimsy. My anxiety is a clingy, insatiable thing but truth telling has been a balm for her unsettled spirit. I am willful, I am hopeful, I am a defiant sentient being. There is no end where I don’t trust the truth that a beginning will always follow.
So — what if we had told each other the truth?
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cover image: ‘sandman’ - danielle mckinney (2023)