Love has always been a language I understood long before I ever spoke it.
A song I knew by heart but murmured only under my breath.
A story I wrote in the margins but never permitted myself to read out loud.
I have always known love—not in the way it settles inside a home,
not in the smell of morning coffee,
or in the small rituals of people who choose each other again and again.
I never saw love fold laundry on a Sunday; hum while stirring pepper soup; or reach for someone else without thinking.
What I knew; deeply, intimately; was leaving.
Absence was my first inheritance.
My mother walked away when I was two, almost three, and her departure stretched into a shadow long enough to shape me.
That kind of abandonment rewires a child.
It solidifies fear.
It teaches you to leave first,
to never want too loudly,
and to confuse self-preservation with emotional starvation.
So, if love was a doorway,
I learned to press my back against it—
not to keep people out, but to make sure no one knew how badly I wanted in.
But then, there was my father
my first home, my only constant,
my training in what love could be when it stayed.
If my mother was absence,
my father was presence in its richest form.
He loved me with certainty;
no exit routes, no hesitation.
I was his baby, his only girl,
the proof that something good came from his life.
With him, I learned the texture of tenderness.
His love was honeyed jazz riffs,
sitting on his lap, dancing in the living room,
the quiet pride when he looked at me.
I collected love from the worlds he gave me:
in blues, in stories,
in characters who stayed and fought and chose each other.
But even in that sweetness,
a question lodged inside me like a shard: if love can stay, then it can also leave.
So, I spent years craving my father’s love in everyone I met.
In the way someone said my name,
in how they touched me,
in whether they positioned me as their joy.
I knew how to make people want me. An ex once said,
“Jean, you have the power to make someone feel like the sun rises just because of their smile.”
She was right.
I knew how to make someone ache for me.
But I never let myself ache back.
I stayed halfway out the door,
a master escape artist disguised as a lover.
I am an enigma;
a maze calling for wanderers,
a paradox held together by contradictions that shouldn’t coexist.
I long for connection,
yet recoil from what it asks of me.
I want to be seen,
yet fear what visibility might undo.
The anticipation of loss became its own loss; I lived inside the disaster before anything ever went wrong.
And then my father died.
The man who showed me love,
who taught me stability,
who knew the shape of my soul, was gone.
When he died,
something else died too:
my ability to guard myself with fear.
Death has a strange way of rearranging a person.
I used to say if anything happened to my father,
I would die with him.
But here I am—
alive.
Breathing.
Writing.
Working.
Hosting book readings.
Laughing.
Falling apart and putting myself together.
If I survived the loss I feared most,
what is left to be afraid of?
What is love compared to death?
What is vulnerability compared to grief’s brutal undoing?
The only thing I was truly afraid of—losing him—has already happened.
And I am still here.
So perhaps,
I can survive love too.
Maybe I am finally ready not to lose someone;
not because I am guaranteed to keep them,
but because I now understand
I will not disappear if they leave.
I want a love that is less performance and more belonging.
A love that frees, not cages.
A love that does not ask me to shrink to be understood.
A love with presence—
steady, quiet, patient,
soft like the way fog lifts at dawn.
J. Krishnamurti writes:
“You are free and from that centre you act.
And hence there is no fear,
and a mind that has no fear is capable of great love.
And when there is love, it can do what it will.”
I think I am finally tasting that freedom,
the kind that comes after devastation,
after ruin,
after watching the worst thing happen
and learning that my heart did not dissolve.
So now,
I want to love on purpose.
Not by accident.
Not as a performance.
Not as coping.
Not as half-presence.
I want to love as arrival.
As choice.
As courage.
As a form of staying.
Perhaps love is not the plunge I once feared,
but the grounding I have been too afraid to claim.
Maybe the point was never to protect myself from losing someone.
Maybe the point is to finally choose someone without rehearsing their departure.
I am still afraid—
but not enough to run anymore.
I think I am finally ready
not to lose someone,
because I have learned
that even in loss,
I do not disappear.
Something remains.
Something grows.
Something becomes.
Maybe that something
is love.