sAid LoVeR
 “When an over-thinker says they love you, believe them. They have thought of a million reasons not to.”
I haven’t had a drink in 48 days. Yesterday, my sister, myself, and her girlfriend all went out to eat after my mom had gotten married for the fourth time in her life. My sister and I talked about my cleanse, because we never thought we’d be two people caring about what we put into our bodies. She asked me what changes I’d noticed about myself since this cleanse. My answers were simple. I have more natural energy and my depression has improved drastically. The answer for myself is that I’m thinking clearer than I ever have. I’ve been drinking for a long time so my thoughts and decisions have probably almost always been impaired. (Since the age of 19, yes, I know not the legal drinking age) My focus has been on love thanks to my trip to this wedding. Shoutout to my Mom for never giving up, I guess. So I’ve been dealing with a Said Lover and honestly, I don’t feel like I’m being loved as fully as I possibly can be. I often times feel like she’s trying to manipulate me to get what she wants from me. Also whatever it is that she wants isn’t really clear, but she swears it is. There are three major things needed to solidify a long-lasting connection: communication, trust, and honesty. Our communication sucks. Trust, for me, left the building a long time ago. Honesty? Well, I can never tell if I’m being told a lie, but words and actions are always a contradiction. With the poor communication I find myself disconnected a lot. I believe that relationships with people who have the same views as you lead to less arguments. I don’t want to make this long because I don’t want to dwell. I’m unfulfilled and the one promise I made to myself this year was to not settle for bull. Trust myself more because I know what’s best. My intuition knows what’s best. Best is not having someone seem annoyed with you because you ask the same question more than once. Best is not someone who post subliminal messages and memes throwing shots. Best is not someone who argues with you then talks as if nothing is wrong the next day. Best is not saying to someone that Erykah Badu is problematic and them replying they like her music. Have we learned nothing about that separate the artist from the art shit with R. Kelly? Where is the why? The polite debate and conversation? Best is not them posting something about a crush and saying it was for you when you never said you needed love... Best is not having to choose your relationship or your friendships. Best is not accepting poor excuses for unacceptable behavior, like texting late at night. Or flirting with supposed mystery friends. Or texting in my ear. Rude. Best is not being seen as someone’s made up definition of toxic, which literally means poisonous. Poison kills. Best is not someone who can’t tell you what’s wrong. (I really like making list) I’ve always got caught in these loops with people because my Taurus can’t walk away. It refuses to accept the flags because gets blinding by the good and that’s all it wants to see. Like damn, what is wrong with you? What do you need? Your loyalty can be waived. Sag and Aquarius back me up on this one. (My rising and moon) ‘I love you’ are literally just words and they can keep you caged. Make people show up. Just because they choose you doesn’t mean they actually really love you. Back up what you’re saying, otherwise you are just talking. So glad words of affirmation fall kind of low on my list. People would be able to feed me anything. Thank you brain for always, always thinking. I owe myself a lot and I’m going to keep giving that to myself. I’ve accepted that I will have to take a lot of losses on this journey, but I’m deep in this process to heal. To have who and what’s best for me. I don’t care how selfish that may look to others. So my subliminal but not so subliminal message is don’t be half-ass loved. Go half somewhere else. Keep loving on yourself lovers. This is our year.
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 I’m just going to jump right in with this one. Who came up with the ridiculous idea that living with your romantic partner was a good idea?
I’ve wondered about this for a long time. Probably since the first time I lived with a lover. Said Lover and I were in over our heads. Let me just pause and say that I had an entire idea of how moving in with a lover was supposed to go. This is thanks to the endless amounts of romantic movies I watched a child and then teen. I was supposed to meet Said Lover, fall in love after several extravagant dates—insert romantic montage here—then look lovingly into their eyes at some random moment offer them a key to my place. Swoon (this is a plug). That’s not the way that it went. At all. Can we first just talk about how hard it is to even get a place of your own and survive in it? Rent, lights, water, a separate bill if you have a gas line, cell phone, groceries... do I need to keep going? Because I can. So there I was at twenty making maybe nine dollars and some change an hour, which was a pay cut I took at a new job to get peace from an old one. Cool. I was managing on my own just fine, ya know, finally understanding why my mama would yell at us about turning on all the damn lights. My sister nicknamed me “Light Monster” as a child because it was always me. I hated the dark. I also used light as a cleaning system on my manic days. I’d walk through the house and turn on all of the lights, clean each room, then turn them off after completion. Yeah, I stopped that shit real quick after I got my first triple digit bill. Nah. So, Said Lover at the time was 19 and still living with her mom and grandmother. She lived an hour away from me. We take turns visiting one another and we of, course, talked about living together because well, we missed each other sometimes. That was all fine and well but I wanted my moment to gaze into her eyes and offer a key. Instead, I got a distress call that her homophonic mom was with the shit again and and wanted her to get out. Me being the Taurus that I am, I’m like, “Fuck her! You can stay with me, you aren’t thrown away!” I said it with my chest. Just like that we were living together. In the heat of the moment, I never stopped to realize the load I was going to carry having another adult depending on me. But again, I’m a bull. Challenge accepted. I should have never allowed myself to be a top option, but a last resort. I won’t say that it was all bad, because it wasn’t. Rolling over for sex and cuddles whenever I wanted to was amazing. She was clean. Like clean clean, so I always came home to good vibes and smells. She wasn’t much of cook, but at the time, neither was I. I had my special dishes that I could whip up, but we couldn’t eat that every day. We had a lot of space so it was easy to merge our things. Everything was everything. Then... We got comfortable. You hear people say that your lose all of your mystery in a marriage. No, you lose it before that. You can’t hide with someone in your space constantly. You over hear conversations, you smell farts, the chocolate cake that you thought about all day won’t be there when you get home because they invited themselves to it. A bad mood for either of you is a bad day; a bad moment if you’re mature enough. A sock on the floor is never just a sock on the floor. It’s disrespectful and dammit you are motherfucking unappreciative. That’s the sort of tolerable shit, right? Well, Said Lover was beyond tolerable. Me being the breadwinner in our home made her complacent. She now looked at me as her job, which made her my obligation. Our arguments were never just words. She liked to break things and punch walls. You could literally hear the dry wall shattering every time that she would punch it. No was starting to be a scary word in my home, because If I said it, then she had to find a way to get her way. I want to say that I was afraid of her. She was much bigger than myself and if in the right position and circumstance she should have really hurt me if the wall stopped enough. I regretted being her savior. I wished I had not spoiled her by buying her expensive clothes and shoes and allowing her to lay under me for free. I guess to me her contribution was her love and the care she took in making sure my days after work were relaxing. I didn’t mind paying the bills. I did mind that she didn’t know that sometimes money was tight and partying or shopping was not in the budget for the month. Once I trusted her to pay the light bill. I gave her 212.00 dollars and went off to work. I returned home and figured she’d done what I asked. Nope. I flipped the switched a few days later and nothing happened. She had gone shopping and told me she thought we could get an extension like we’d always done. I just stood there waiting for her to find her common sense. It never came. We ended up having to stay any my cousin’s place until my next pay day. I can go on and on about the continuous downfall of my co-existence with Said Lover, but she wouldn’t be the last. I just find that I’m always on red alert when I have to share a space with a lover. What mood will they be in when I make it home? Will they clean the way that I do? Will we actually pay attention to one another or our phones? Will we get bored? What’s the plan once we make it home? Who decides what to eat? A lot of this stress can be accredit to that lovely thing called patriarchy. I think I constantly find myself in confusion because I never know if I’m wife or husband. Then I get mad at myself for needing to play a role at all. I’m unlearning. While I don’t think I want to live with anyone again for a while, I know how I would want it to be. 50/50 is honestly bullshit. I know I said in a previous blog that I want what I offer. I’m allowed to evolve. What I want is a healthy balance of strengths and weaknesses. I’m a good cook so I’ll take someone who will wash the dishes. It would be nice if they tried to cook for me every once in a while as a sweet gesture, but its not mandatory. I need someone who can communicate their moods. In the past I’ve dealt with passive aggression or downright silence. I don’t like it. This one is a big one, which is why I’m giving it its own space. WE NEED TO BE ABLE TO TALK ABOUT MONEY COMFORTABLY. I don’t know why people get weird about money. I don’t care about how much a person makes. I don’t care what’s in their checking or savings. Can you manage it? Can you make good financial decisions? Do you have good or bad debt? Yes, there is a difference ! Are you a spender or saver? I honestly should have been an account. I’m really good with money. The leading cause of divorce is MONEY. Anyway, I said all of this to say that you are allowed to be careful about who you let into your space. Society has us all under the impression that living with a lover and marriage is the goal, but it doesn’t have to be. Do only what fulfills you. Be nontraditional. And don’t let the glitter and gloss of two incomes be the deciding factor. You’ll find yourself comfortable and miserable. Rebel! I met a couple in October 2018 that have been together for years and they each have their own places. They visit and love each other dearly. One is a writer and the other is a musician. Do you see how this could be an interruption? They understand. Your space is sacred and I wished I’d learned that sooner. I have a routine that I’m in the process of getting back to because it was interrupted. I like to wake up and listen to music, think about my day ahead, then get going. I like to unwind when I get home then maybe watch a show or two and sit in silence. I haven’t been meditating lately, but I have been working out and that’s been amazing. I’m still working out the kinks. Some things have to be moved around and I’ll be happy with my routine again and I won’t ever allow it to be interrupted again. I want someone to fit, not interrupt. There’s a difference.  I waited for Justice to knock. I stared at the key holder by our door that spelled out home and the custom-made wood carvings just beneath it that read: Justice and Deanna. Her knock startled me. I stood in the doorway, opening it just enough for Justice to walk through. She was coming to get her things. This was finally it. I watched her as she moved from the front to the back, passing pictures of us that hung all over and picking up things that were once ours when we were in love.
Now out of love, they were just hers. I could see her sneaking peeks at me as she moved around. Her pain was apparent and so was mine. I never understood how loud silence could be in comparison to noise until that very moment. Had we finally run out of things to talk about? How did we get here? For a second, I wanted to read her mind and see if she was thinking the same things as me. There had been a point when her love was exactly what I needed to get through every day. I had to admit that the days hadn’t exactly been easy without her. So did I still need her love to make it? Yes. I felt my heart beat fast as she walked over to our dresser and sat down the chain I’d bought her for her birthday. I wanted her to keep it. At least then, I’d know she would remember me long after time had healed both of our wounds and new lovers were in place. She sat it down slowly, and that was enough for me to know that it was hard for her to part ways with it and possibly me, too. She never did hide her emotions well, but what Cancer could unless it was behind exaggerated anger. I loved that I knew her so well but I hated it, too, because it would make it harder to erase her; harder to forget that she liked her burgers plain, her friends loaded, and a Dr. Pepper to wash it all down. Now I thought of everything that I would have to forget: our first date when she held my hands and asked me to be her girlfriend wedding proposal style. Us sitting on the floor of the bookstore reading Canterbury tales, Nikki Giovanni, and Shakespeare. Her giving me the last of anything she was drinking when we went out to eat just because she knew I wouldn’t finish a refill and she liked to share. She would leave the television on my favorite channel—Lifetime—and run my bath water. I would complain about it being too cold. Justice got angry at me when I took too long to get into bed. She needed to kiss me every night before we fell asleep whether we were angry or not. I’d remember the fact that she wouldn’t sleep without some part of her body touching mine. Then, every morning she greeted me as though she hadn’t fallen asleep with me the night before. The thoughts of our movie dates and Blockbuster nights, just us. I’d be forever haunted. She still packed. I wondered what she would miss about me, if anything at all since she was pretending not to care right now. I knew better. She had her favorite things about us. Our clubbing nights, where because of me, we always had to match each other no matter what; we’d actually started matching by accident. There were story nights when I read to her sliding in some poetry sometimes. I kissed her entire face, gave her countless back rubs, we took long showers; made love beneath the drops. I’d wash her back and she’d wash mine. She hated my random biting, but loved the nights she caught me singing by accident. She carried my bags when we shopped because I was too much of a diva to do it. Who would I put my feet on now as I slept? She’d never find another to give her our reinvented butterfly kiss, which was my long lashes, fluttering against her cheek. Why are we over, I thought. She threw her bag over her shoulder and turned to face me in our, no my bedroom. It was the first time we’d looked into each other’s eyes since the break-up. My soul lived in those eyes; they set me on fire. She reached out her hand, my my door key in her palm, but I didn’t want it. I walked past her stretched arm, standing close, pulling her bag from her shoulder and dropping it to the floor. I reached for her chain on the dresser and unhooked it, latching it around her neck. I spoke in a whisper since the tears that sat in my throat prevented me from speaking louder, “Don’t… ever…” I paused to hold my tears, “…take this off again.” My hand shook as I reached up to touch her face. Her eyes started to water. She grabbed me tight and held me close to her and it shocked me. I wrapped my arms around her and she buried her face into my neck and started biting at my flesh. I could feel her tears running down my collarbone as she kissed me. She tossed me onto the bed and stood beside me removing her shirt, then her sports bra. My eyes widened. She hated to expose her chest, so this was just like saying I love you. She pulled off her shoes, then her jeans and boxers. She got into bed, leaning over me and raising my shirt. I pulled it over my head, exposing myself to her. She pressed her skin against mine and lay in my chest. Her tears were warm. I reached my hand to her face and in my mind I had flashes of the first time I wiped her crying eyes due to her thoughts of not being good enough for me because she had nothing to offer. That was so far from the truth. She leaned up kissing me again, while sliding my pajama pants off. She kissed down the middle of my stomach but I grabbed her head. I didn’t want to have sex. We lay in bed holding each other and crying. This is what it took for us to understand each other. We couldn’t get anything right, because in arguments we had the same problem, we never saw the other side. However, this was love and love was where we both wanted to be. We had achieved love and now we had to get through the hard part—loving the flaws of each other. I looked into her eyes. ''I'll unpack your bags.'' She kissed me and turned around so that I could spoon her. She liked when I laid behind her and held her. That was the only time that I didn’t mind seeing her back.  I can’t believe it’s February already. You know what that means: Valentine’s Day. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with this day. It’s supposed to represent love and all that it is, but here we are surrounded by red. A color of power, aggression, correction, failure, anger, and lust. It’s not a happy color. I can almost remember each Valentine’s Day I’ve ever had, from elementary up to last year. The only noteworthy one happened in 2012. Said Lover at the time went all out and it was absolutely amazing. Said Lover understood that to me it was just another day, but for them it was a big deal and who was I to deny them the joy of making me happy because it made them happy just to see me smile? Said Lover ran me a bath, cooked my favorite Olive Garden dish, ate it with me by candlelight, covered my bed with rose petals, and watched a movie with. Y’all, my little Taurus heart was full. I’m lowkey a hopeless romantic, but don’t tell nobody. My most embarrassing Valentine’s day was probably in high school. I wasn’t exactly a cool kid. Boys mostly talked to me when they needed help with their homework. While other girls walked around with big bears and balloons, I had were books. My father dropped me off to school on that particular day. He noticed that all the girls walked around with their pretty extravagant gifts and asked where was mine. Seriously, Dad? Realizing how stupid his question was, he returned after school with a rose and a card. He said, “I can’t have my baby walking around with nothing. The day was already over so I, in fact, walked around with nothing. While his gesture was sweet, it just felt like pity and the shame I had not felt all day hit me hard. Up until that point, I’d never cared that boys didn’t really talk to me that way. I got to avoid the pressures that other high school girls faced daily--at least at school, not in my neighborhood. I was always in control. He tried, but I wished he hadn’t. It made me wonder what he thought about me since other boys didn’t like me enough to buy me candy. Shouldn’t he be happy about that? Anyways. There was the worse Valentine’s. Said Lover bought a lavish hotel, drenched me in superficial gifts (last thing on my love language list) then got upset because I wanted to stay in and cuddle opposed to going to the club with friends. We tried to have sex, which turned awful and awkward. I’d bought Lingerie and everything only to end the night with an argument and awkward environment. A waste. The very next year with same Said Lover, I was in a hotel room alone while they pretended to cry and plead their love and loyalty after getting caught inboxing a stripper they were trying to hook up with the same night. I can’t make this shit up. There was some random sweetness here and there. Once I got a big ass teddy bear from an ex, but her ass was the cheater of all cheaters, so I left it with my abby sister in 2007 and haven’t seen it since. I’ll have an extravagant day without a mishap with someone who I want to keep. One day. Because well, I’M A HOPELESS ROMANTIC. Shhh. This is a hate blog. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. So yeah, I’m not exactly best friends with the idea of cupid. A lot of my failures at love were my own fault because I’ve always ignored that thing that represents love--red. RED FLAGS. So, Dearest Cupid, I’ve been through enough to know what I don't want if you must violently stab me. No, to drunks. No, to liars. No, to insecurities. This one can probably be fleshed out a bit more, because if we’re being honest then we’re all insecure about something, but can you talk about it? That’s important. No, to cheaters No, to a lover that gets defensive when I call her out on her bullshit. No, to a lover that’s closed-minded. No, to a lover that doesn’t understand accountability. No, to a lover that blames my frustrations on me, when said frustration is a direct reaction to their behavior. No, to a lover that lies about their connections to certain friends. We're all adults here. Cut that shit out. No, to a lover that robs me of my choice to decide in any situation. Yes, to hopeless romantics. Yes, to a lover with goals. Yes, to a lover that shows not tells. I mean telling it cool too, but back that shit up. Yes, to a lover that knows what her toxic shit is and is working diligently to fix it. Yes, to a lover who understands my mental health isn’t always at it’s best. Yes, to a lover who can give me my space. Yes, to a lover who can clap for me and all that I accomplish. Yes, to a lover that will understand that I evolve so much that my mind changes minute-to-minute. Yes, to a lover that can sit in silence w/ me comfortably. Yes, to a woman that understands that I need to talk through everything or I will choose to shutdown. Yes, to a woman that will help take my weave out, wash my hair, and grease this dry ass scalp. Yes, to a lover that gets me. Yes, to a lover that gets me. YES, to a lover that gets me. It’s impossible for me to think of everything little thing that I can yes and no to, but this is a start if I must be hit. I challenge you to know yourself, to know what you will and won't tolerate and to enforce it unapologetically. I also challenge you to be all of the things that you see, otherwise your wants are in vein. This Valentine's Day, where a different color. Be royal (purple), be calm (blue), be optimistic (yellow). Be something outside of the box, if you are someone who celebrates the day to the fullest. If you aren’t, don’t ruin it for someone else. Take your grouchy ass somewhere else, away from the lovers of love, who choose to cease every moment. Get paid or get laid. It’s you day! |
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