Water Come Back to You: On Trying to Write About Love
Good love.
The email request was that you write about good love for a Valentine’s Day reading event.
The event organizer is also a friend. She’d read your stories and essays. Didn’t she know that you could write about bad love and sexy love—the other types of love to be showcased at the reading—in your sleep?
Or perhaps that’s why she assigned you good love. As a challenge.
“Fuck,” you said. You didn’t need a challenge. You needed a little tenderness.
The weight of this story you’d been asked to write was so heavy, you didn’t even procrastinate the way you usually do when deadlines loom. Instead, you resigned yourself to writing a good love story. You started by sketching out a scene of a married couple shopping at Bed Bath & Beyond on their tenth anniversary. That felt like some good, wholesome love. And then about five paragraphs in, you hit a wall. Hard. You thought about how you had been part of a Bed Bath & Beyond-shopping couple, not once, but twice, and how, all appearances to the contrary, neither of those had been good love stories. Your second wedding was a beautiful family affair aboard a small yacht in the Gulf of Mexico at sunset. With your ivory sleeveless gown and wavy locs, you looked like a goddess. Your daughters and his, four in total, decked out in lavender, completed the fantasy. He wore a guayabera, also ivory, and his broad smile betrayed nothing of the three years’ worth of silent treatments and other punishments he had doled out to you. Your second marriage should not have even been a second date.
* * *
So how do you write about a kind of love you never had? The kind you were always grasping for but could not reach? The kind that you, hopeful, poured and poured into in the washtub of a marriage, of marriages, not knowing that there were holes on his side, their sides, that he, they, these husbands of yours, neglected to mention.
A broken mind. A hole. A body lost. A hole. Fear. A hole. Obligation. A hole. Escape. A hole. Resentment. A hole. Unspeakable wounds, at once fresh and ancient. The great-great-great grandmothers and grandfathers, the enslaved and the enslavers, long gone, have left their marks. How do you write about a love that spilled out of holes and onto the ground and softened the soil, but left you dry and wanting?
You say you didn’t know the holes were there on his side, their side. But didn’t you see the mud, didn’t you feel the earth slacken beneath your bare feet? Weren’t your feet cold and wet, like you those nights you sobbed on the bathroom floor?
Girl, didn’t you feel it, every time you cried, all those times you cried, so much your eyes would be swollen almost completely shut the next day, because the tears always took over the night? And it was always the night because the days were filled with children and grocery lists and deadlines and laundry, the fucking laundry, and the possibility that he, they, would come around, surprise you, learn tenderness, and love you better. But nightfall brought the truth, and with it, tears and the realization that you would not be loved better that day. That nothing had changed. He, they, had not changed. They were still broken or lost or afraid or burdened or trapped or resentful or wounded. And so were you. And that day’s fresh disappointment picked at the nascent scab covering yesterday’s disappointment, and you bled anew. Not blood, but tears.
And all those tears? That was your water come back to you. The love you poured and poured into that marriage, those marriages, full of holes, love-water salted from the earth, trying to tell you.
You know how to write about the love that wasn’t, about the drought and the swelling and the mud. But how do you write about what you wanted? Can your imagination reach that far? Are you even a writer if you can’t do this? Because aren’t writers supposed to be world-builders, scene-creators, truth-tellers? Can you tell the truth about the love you wanted but didn’t get, by giving that love to someone else, a character you create? Are you afraid you will ask your creation, Why you and not me? Is that it? Are you afraid to conjure a woman like that for fear of unearthing that fresh and ancient question, What’s wrong with me? And then: grace. And a draft. The only ways you know how to begin anything.
You draft that woman, that marriage. You draft the mundanity, the everydayness of their life together, that Bed Bath & Beyond moment. You draft her grief and his being caught unaware, his confusion. You draft her anger. You draft her eventual vulnerability. You draft his eventual loving response. And the whole thing is as flat as you feel.
And then: grace. And a revision. The only ways you know how to finish anything.
You revise them: Her grief remains, but you edit out her anger and move her vulnerability forward, for all the times anger masked your hurt. You make him aware, you make him see her, for all the times you were unseen. You write his love as present action. And you end it with a good love moment, the only certain thing they have.
Through your creation, you have picked yourself up off the bathroom floor. You created a love out of your own longing and gave it away. You delivered good love on demand.
Deesha Philyaw’s (@DeeshaPhilyaw) debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.