What You Won't Do For Love

Six love songs in my library.
I've listed them in the order I believed them:
What You Won't Do For Love.
As Long As You Love Me.
The Best of My Love.
But Daddy I Love Him.
Can't Help Falling in Love.
Crazy Little Thing Called Love.

The first one is a question.
Hold on to that. I can answer it.

I fell in love twice.
The first time I hadn't met myself yet,
so I mistook the mirror for the man holding it,
learned what I looked like to somebody
and spent a year thanking him for the view.
By the time I could tell the difference
everyone had already seen it coming,
and I stood in the courtroom of my own mind
making the case: But Daddy I Love Him.

What I was left with was an excavation.
The brain that had been shouting reason the whole time,
the one that knew, that always knew,
they went in and drained it.
Fluid where the thinking should have been.
Enough that the doctor said paralysis
in a voice too calm for what it uprooted.
What You Won't Do For Love:
that. I won't do that again.

Then they told me it wasn't finished.
Cancer came and stayed six months
and did not take me, only scared,
which is a sentence I get to write
and a lot of people don't.
She kept me in a small room and made it smaller,
and in that shrinking taught me the only arithmetic I trust:
what is in front of you is what you have.

When she let me go, she left me love.
Not the loud kind. The kind that hums.
It said this begins and ends with you.
And then it wouldn't stay put.
I was less a person than a vessel love was walking around in.
The Best of My Love.

And one day it was too much to keep,
and it went looking.
It took me to Barcelona,
to an Irish pub on lottery night,
and I struck gold in a room full of strangers.
He didn't speak English. Not a word of it.
A Brazilian who fights for a living, who jumps out of planes,
who has done things in uniform he doesn't describe,
and the kindest human in the room.
We had no shared vocabulary
and we talked for hours anyway.
It was the way he went looking for the word
his mouth couldn't find,
and never once let the silence become an exit.
As Long As You Love Me.
I thought that meant: this is all it takes.

Since then my tongue has learned two new languages
and my feet have touched continents I couldn't have pointed to.
I saw this world because of him.
And now we are on the wrong sides of it again.

Here is where the songs stop helping,
because every one of them says go.
Crazy in Love, Dangerously in Love, Drunk in Love,
Beyoncé is very clear on this.
But there's a quiet burrow in my chest that says
you can move for purpose, you cannot move for love.

I don't know how to say that to the man I love.
That I learned in a hospital gown
what happens to a woman who loves
in the place where her self should be.
That I will come. I will.
When something bigger than either of us is pulling,
so resentment never gets a room in the house.
Surrender, I keep thinking. Turn the palms up.
And every time I do
it isn't grace that comes to the door.
It's paperwork.

So no, I don't have an answer.
I have a dream, and a man, and a self
that cost me a skull to find.
Wise men say only fools rush in.
I have been a fool. I have been opened up over it.
And still, on the worst nights,
with the whole continent between us:
Can't Help Falling in Love.

I wrote this poem for an English class. Creative writing through the lens of poetry, the first academic writing class I've ever taken. I walked in worried structure would box me in. It has only freed me.

My teacher's main correction was to be careful with "I have a dream." After MLK, those words belong to someone.

He's right. Although I, too, have a dream.

And I had a vivid one last night.

Since I started liking (fine, loving) my new job in LA, I've been carrying an ache in my chest. The plan was eight months together in Barcelona after graduating in December, then LA alone in August to start my finance career—more years of long distance. I'd spent so long treating Barcelona as the place I was supposed to be that standing anywhere else felt like disobeying my purpose.

I found a paradise and made it a prison outside its coordinates.

I tried to hate my hometown. I tried to dislike my dream job. The harder I pushed the universe back toward Barcelona, the less any of it made sense.

Then I dreamed of a pink Malibu sunset. Mr. International, finishing a class at the LA location of his new fight club. Me, driving home from my skyscraper office on Constellation Boulevard. The two of us running across the street to the shore.

It quieted the ache. It also made no sense. Where was Barcelona?

At 3 p.m. today, he called, and I told him how everything was falling into place. My dad was connecting with my coworkers. My network, my experience, my hometown, and a job I genuinely love were beginning to converge. I told him I feel like I am going to take off the moment I get there.

Then he interrupted me.

And before I could get mad, I went speechless.

He's only been there a few months, but the fight club has called their building home for sixteen years. Now it has new owners. They want the gym gone. First they said December. After a fight with lawyers, they said July.

And what is July?

My last month in Barcelona.

Only days ago, we'd been laughing about how he hadn't even known about America before he met me. He didn't speak English. Now he'd been invited to lead a seminar at the LA location over Thanksgiving, twenty minutes from the house I grew up in. He'd found this international gym after the local family business that brought him from Brazil to Barcelona stopped being his future. Somehow, searching for something that brought him closer to me had actually brought him here.

And now I might not be the only one whose Barcelona ends in July.

"There are days I just miss you so much, and I hate not being able to do anything about it," he said.

We'd been surviving on five day visits meant to soothe months apart. It had worked when we were both busy trying to get to the next step. But now, as he put it, we were finally at a crossroads where we had a choice.

And he wanted to use it.

I told him I couldn't choose between him and my dream job. It was impossible.

"Don’t," he said.

So the plan stays the same. I'll go to Barcelona in December. Dance, write, model, get my Spanish residency, network. Then, in July, we'll decide together: LA or Barcelona?

If it's LA, he'll bring his parachute, his airsoft guns (hopefully not his Funko Pops), get a truck and a motorcycle, and start over.

As for the whole you can move for purpose, not love thing?

America offers a jiu-jitsu visa. Jiu-jitsu just joined the UFC this year. My cousin is a UFC Octagon girl. I was in an elevator with Dana White at my office this summer. And my Brazilian boy is going to find out what his passion can do in a place that's practically begging for it.

"What do you love about Barcelona?" I asked him.

The chance to learn a new language. A new culture.

"Here I go again," he said.

"No. Here we go together."

While he talked through the possibilities, I cried. Not because everything was suddenly certain, but because he was answering fears I'd only ever whispered into the dark. He was willing to build a new life so I wouldn't have to abandon the next step I've been working so hard toward.

For the first time, love and purpose aren't opposing forces. I can't believe I get to write this: there will be no impossible choice between them.

As I told him today, if this doesn't make you believe in something greater, I don't know what will. The strings tethering us together are so narrow, so specific, so unfathomable that I can't help but feel someone, something, is holding them all.

Could it be that whatever is moving the players on the chessboard is rooting for us?

And this is exactly what I will do for love.

On second thought, I think this is what love does for you.