As a young girl, I never thought to question the notion that falling in love would be the catalyst to finalizing my existence as a woman. I understood the boundary of girlhood and womanhood as something which laid in the borderland between desire and want.
Love was a woman, deeply desired, craved, and held only by men with monstrous definitions; their shadows smothering young girls like me in their depth.
And I wanted to be overtaken, to be undone. My skin ached for the moments of emptiness felt by softer women, built in black and white, as their bodies elongated and worn, lay stretched and weak as they waited for him to call, to name her coveted. I dreamt of the nights of shadow women, encompassed in their love’s expanse, women who disappeared at a man’s touch, who fell into the gazes of wandering men, all happening upon eternity. The ultimate gift.
But, as life swept me in deeper and deeper into its grasp, love could not find me. I called out to her through the lonely years, chose her to be my God, and worshipped til every breath became a sacrifice. But still, love could not find me.
Time seemed to sigh at my collapse into lostness and as my shell shed and rebirthed herself at 15 years; I became aware of the wrongness in my womanhood. I would not become the type of woman men would die for. Instead, I was something else, deeply concentrated in the borderlands of bodies emigrating from soul to air. I filled myself with nothing but blood and water til my figure blended with the atmosphere, my shape nothing more than the rush of the night wind. And yet, my blackness could be overwhelming, seeping into the points of my being and screaming my presence into the stalls of bleakness.
What I had not known before but now could not be ignored were the oceans of a black girl. The lakes and rivers spilling out of me constantly, my tides rising and sinking as my chest, breasts now blooming with heaving femininity into my aura.
What you are and have always been cannot be loved in the ways you wish, young girl. You are a soul uncontained, a body without refinement. You are feared and named. Your love is buried deep in the soil of your past selves. She roars at every fallen tear. Hear her, feel her, see her, save her.
What is love? As a young girl, love was elusive. It was yearning. Love was the velvet pronunciation of deep sorrow smoothed across every bone, every muscle, every vein, every fiber of your body, of your soul, until it was you. The sorrow, the yearning, the elusivity was all you and who you were before meant nothing. Love was everything.
But at 18-years-old and living this long without an amorous love’s anointment. I’ve come to understand the strength locked in the bounds of loneliness. I am a lonely woman, I am a free woman, I am a loved woman. I love deeply, in ways my younger self could not understand. This love, platonic, whole, and constant, outstretched along the worlds I’ve collected as I’ve grown, unchained, unclaimed, and full connects the messy, entangled existence I bear which holds within it the intersections of queerness, blackness, and womanhood.
With hands never held and left unmarked by a lover’s seizing, I have been crafted by the palms of seed-sprouted black girls. Beetroot, raven skin melting into my own, thermal, souls impenetrable, their words urging me into tangibility. I am the realization of a different kind of love, one which championed growth, empathy, humanity, and kindness over desire. These bonds, shaped through our shared experiences of alienation, erasure, and feelings of smallness, helped mold an other-worldly cocoon of acceptance and tolerance of the havoc encased in Black girlhood. The recognition of my own queer-hood budding through these friendships, not on the foundation of sexual attraction but through the appreciation of the shelter, the liberation innate to a woman’s intimacy. I became an entity capable of a tenderness that did not rely on the connotation of a romantic love’s wanting.
These days, each breath is no longer an atonement for the error in not making myself easily seen or obtained by love’s gravity. Instead, I have chosen to reclaim the young girl I once put out into the hurricane of my own regret. I’ve made the choice to build a love for myself which can bend to the shifting and ever-changing seas of my essence. Self-love.
The girl of my youth could not have known her, understood her importance or seen how she would stay. Through the undoing, through the hatred, the tears, the collapse, the chaos of being a girl unloved, I did not feel her holding me, spooning ourselves into warmth, gently stroking my hair, declaring her love for me even if her love was one I did not know I wanted or needed. She has always been there, keeping me alive and molding me into the woman I am today. A woman entrenched in freedom’s gale, ruthless with survival, and unkept. I am my own eternal love. And after spending so many years wishing to forget myself, to erase the love passed down by women of this Earth, all having gone through revivals of their own— I will not take her for granted.