This Could Be Us

There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.

When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.

a woman who wants more and realizes she deserves it is a dangerous thing.

When are we ever done working on ourselves? I believe wholeness is not a destination, but a lifetime process. Something that instead of waiting for, you could be living for.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition. It’s the only way I have enough love for everyone who needs it—to love myself. No one can love me like I do. No one knows me like I know myself.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” —bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

You can risk loving completely when you completely love yourself.

She loves an undeserving man. It’s a sorrow most women experience at some point in their lives, whether it’s a father who neglects or a son who forgets or a husband who betrays. These men let us down and we pull ourselves back up, hopefully with the help of other women who love us in ways that heal.

There are so many ways to break a woman’s heart. Her children. Her lover. Her body when it betrays her. Life is clever that way, devising plans for our demise from the moment we’re born. Death by a million heartbreaks, a thousand regrets, a hundred goodbyes.

I’m learning that to love and be loved is a perfectly healthy desire, unless we believe that relationship is somehow supposed to make us feel worthy or fulfilled. There’s so much pressure not to be alone that sometimes it makes you feel like as a single person you don’t have as much identity. It compels us to search for that person who will make us feel whole.

You accept a man shitting on you,” she used to say, “he’ll make himself at home. There’s no three strikes. You use me, take me for granted, you prove you don’t deserve to be in my life.

I read that Richard Bach book everyone at the library was raving about. He said what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. I know what he meant. When we have hard times, huge changes that seem to be the end of the world as we know it, it’s actually an incubator for metamorphosis. For a new beginning. To me he misses the point, as men so often do. When you hurt the way we women sometimes have to, when you lose so much, when the world ends over and over and over again, we are no longer butterflies. Those wings are much too fragile to carry us on and through. I’m a hornet. I can love. And I can sting.

I just like being around her. She makes me feel lighter. After all the anxiety and responsibility I’ve lived with for so long, “lighter” is an addictive feeling.

I am out with lanterns looking for myself.”—Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence

I guess I wanted to let you know that when you are ready to spend time with someone else,” he says, “I’d like to be someone.

I look at each of my daughters with deliberate care, wanting them to see strength and resolve. I love that I’ve raised girls who think about me, who care about me as a human, not just their mother who exists to serve their every need.

I told her I am the love of my life. I have learned to love myself without judgment or condition. It’s the only way I have enough love for everyone who needs it—to love myself.

It was always something with them, and I refused to subject my boys to their ignorance and stubborn insistence that they knew best when they didn’t know jack shit about what we were dealing with.

If I’m dating a white dude, he better be invited to the cookout. A man with that Christopher Jamal Evans energy.

We were partners. We were a team. We still are.

Your skin is summer night and your kiss is all I want.

Life is always gonna be complicated, but the good stuff is worth fighting for.

I suffered a betrayal so devastating it could have hardened me, could have taught me to withhold my heart. Instead, I have learned to save my heart for one worthy of it.

I’ve learned that revealing yourself to your partner should bring healing, not harm. That a true intimate relationship is a safe place with no facades. A space where you can be wholly yourself.

I believe wholeness is not a destination, but a lifetime process.

It’s in these quiet moments, in these conversations with my heart, that I realize I can never take responsibility for someone else’s bad character.

I am out with lanterns looking for myself.” —Emily Dickinson, personal correspondence