145
My father’s memory is changing—changing in that way that so often happens to one who has lived for 84 years. This struggle he is having with his memory is one of the reasons I moved back to South Carolina. I wanted to be physically closer to him. I wanted to see him every day that I could. I wanted to put my hands on his hands—whenever it was possible.
Yesterday, I asked him, "Papa, how long have you and Mama been married?" He didn’t answer me. Instead, he squeezed my hand tightly and kissed them both, one by one. Some days he knows he has been married 60 years and some days he does not remember at all. But each time my hand touches his hands, or his face, the eyes of a man, who remembers love and its many revelations, bloom where memory seems to short-circuit and lickety-split.
I have been a student of love for 57 years. I have experienced and learned love in the ways that all humans experience and learn love, through watching others around me love and through submitting my own ready-or-not vulnerable self to the deep waters of love, in order to know love, and to also better know myself, in order to give love, that wondrous, mysterious, fragrant, cornerstone-of-life, fundamental sweet marker of being alive—a good go, a good try. I have succeeded at love. I have failed too. Without the love that I have experienced in my life I would never have become the poet that I am still trying everyday of my life to be. Love is essential to every word I write and touch is love’s true essential oil.
Recently, I wrote in my journal that I would never be as "fortunate" in my life as my mother and father have been in their lives, because at my present age, I would never get to love anyone as long as they have loved—for 60 years—no breaks—no stops—no changing of the guard. I don’t believe this anymore. I believe that whenever good love arrives at our door, no matter our age, no matter how many times we have tried, we are so fortunate.
When love has, unfortunately, ended in my life, I swear that I will never return to its arms again. That’s it! I shout this out to my lonesome self as I walk away proclaiming that it’s too hard, the rules always change, and maybe just maybe I’m not meant to be connected to another person in this primal passionate way. Then, slowly, I am returned to my love senses, perhaps by my devoted guardian ancestors or by the great angels of love themselves. I am reminded of what love means to me and to every metaphor and simile, to every wild indefatigable sentence or phrase about anything that has ever mattered to me, any subject of consequence that I have ever sweated over with a pencil and finally given wings to in my life. I give my hurt and disappointment in myself, or in the other person, or both of us, a full set of seasons—a fall—a winter—a spring— a summer—365 days— and then I release it all; the good, the bad, the ugly, back into the universe with all the other good and bad and ugly love fragments spinning there and then I bow my head, step out, and try again.
145 days ago I got all dressed up and went out on the first blind date of my life. It was a date set up by a old friend who lives in another city who made me promise to not Google the woman whose name she had just given me and was now sending me out to dinner with. "Nikky, she said, trust me on this, okay, just trust me." 145 days later, after trusting what a friend could see, this is a photograph of what loves resembles. I believe it is also a preview of the writing to come in 2015, new words that I haven’t even met in person yet.
Without love—it doesn’t matter what or how long we remember what we thought we knew. Without sweet touch—words don’t matter.
Nikky