#15: About Love

“Have enough courage to trust love one more time — and always one more time.”
— Maya Angelou

Hey you — yes, you.

You who have traveled the written miles of these fifteen essays with me. From the depths of depression to a mountaintop in Mexico— oh the places we’ve been, haven’t we?

Let me tell you about the place I’m writing this from. I’m sitting in my favorite lounge in Jozi — the one where the staff know my name and my order by heart: a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of sparkling water, a glass of wine, and a plate of vegetarian California sushi rolls. I come here to think, to write, to be. I feel so at home… not just geographically, but in my skin. There was a time I didn’t know if I’d make it here — not to Johannesburg, but back to myself.

There’s an entire universe between the woman captured at the start of this essay series and the one who’s ending them. Everything has changed: my address, my job, my relationship status, my body. I have evolved in almost every way, and yet I am more me than I have ever been.

Here’s what each migration, both physical and spiritual, has taught me: not every leaving is a loss. Reclaiming myself meant letting go of — and redefining — so many inches of identity. Identities are malleable things, quite separate from the self, I’ve learned.

Of all the things I left behind, the hardest was my marriage. For all the hurt, there was love there — you don’t do life with someone for twelve years without that. Out of respect for those dozen years, for him, I will never write about the details.

What I will say is this: my marriage was the site of many wounds, but it was also the source of many lessons. I entered that relationship trying to balance what I sensed I wanted with who I was told I should be. I came out of it clear about who I am and giving far fewer damns about what anyone expects of me. Wouldn’t take nothing for my journey now — word to Maya Angelou.

My life is filled with so much love: love for and from God, family, friends, and community. I am madly in love with myself.

Now, one thing remains.

There’s a line from a Chimamanda Adichie novel that haunts me: “I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.”

Romantic love is the unfinished task of my evolution.

The first love I ever experienced from a man was my father’s. It is still the purest love I’ve ever experienced from the opposite sex. My father is not the only man who has loved me, but he was the first who showed me what it was like to be liked: not just for what value I could bring, but simply for being me. My father delighted in my being, and I in his. His love, even after his life, still helps me understand the love of God.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever experience that kind of love, romantically…

The Bible says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, KJV). It also says that even faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains.

My mustard-seed faith tells me this:

Somewhere beyond the human vending machines called dating apps,
beyond the social media debates about coffee dates and 50/50 bills,
beyond shallow theology about who is the head and who is the neck —
there is a garden, and I will meet love there.

So, this series ends with a story that hasn’t been written yet.

As Brianna Wiest writes in The Pivot Year, “There are a lot of things you can give up on in this life, but love is not one of them.”

While I no longer have an interest in many of the things I once considered indicative of love — engagement rings, wedding dresses, government documents — I still believe in the thing at the core: partnership.

Despite the odds, despite the data — lived and quantitative — I still believe there is someone out there. Someone who will see me in all my complexity and simplicity, my seriousness and silliness, my chaos and calm; someone who will love and like me not despite these things, but because of them.

I am unwilling to settle for anything less.

This, right here, is the greatest miracle: to remain soft and open despite everything I know and everything I’ve been through; to hold imagination despite the realities I’ve navigated.

Hope has become my rebellion.

Faith is my triumph over the darkness.

And so this ends where all good things do:

With love.

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