Love is a strange nest, or at least the kind of love you attempt, the same strange nest both of you and your beloved build over and over, to escape this wordless song your mother carries, which you cannot help but translate into sacred text:
It will get better when you get old. Less off-handed comments. Less second-too-long stares. Less ungentle assumptions. Because then people care a little less. They still care, but with age comes a kind of cruel gentleness. That doesn’t make it fair. That doesn’t undo the hates you cannot uncollect, the slurs that still might ring in your ears. But it makes everything count more, when you and he come from visibly oversimplified difference. And then difference is not what it seems at all. Because you two become one in a way they’ll never understand. Because you are not living as they expect you to. Because they see you together as something that must be explained or solved or destroyed, when too your father and I, when your father and I— how it robbed us a good deal of happiness in our youth. You must be stronger. You must not let it.
Love is knowing you will never escape this song that she wants you to escape. Love is these words she does not speak to you but spits on the ground. Love is weaving them into your nest, along with the sticks and rocks hurled, the pin feathers pulled from dust, the dead skin shed as tears, even the wings of mosquitos that suck your blood— all of this your beloved and you weave into the nest. Because you will never be someone else’s coming full circle. Because loving your beloved is not difficult, but difficult for other people, some of whom you don’t even know. Because you are forever building that strange nest with your beloved, without full stop, without ever saying when.
*
Once at a beach bar on Padre Island, the island of your childhood, two twentysomething men took a seat nearby and stared at you and your love with hard, frozen faces. They waited for you to pass by on your way to the bathroom so that one could shout to his friend: Thinks she charges by the hour? They were sitting right next to each other. They shouted for/at you. They both laughed. You whirled around, not letting it pass. It would not come to pass, the breaking of the nest.
You loomed over them, over their table, and hissed: What did you say? And how their eyes loomed back, though they were sitting, how their eyes lingered on the thin straps of your tank top, down to the ripped hem of your shorts. They themselves were in collar-up polo shirts and shorts; it was well over a ninety degrees that evening.
What hatred were those eyes.
What hatred dared to look back to where your belove sat, your love seeing but unable to hear the whole thing, arising from his chair, bringing another branch to the nest you were building, and your voice was shaking as you said, that’s my fiancé, hating to have to use such sterile, official language, wishing you didn’t so need your family there, especially your cousins, your many cousins whose sheer number would let an evening be an evening.
What followed, what tumbled and charged out of their mouths, you refuse to write here, the bigoted names they hurled as your beloved approached. How they then went silent when he stepped in front of you and asked what was going on, such is their power not to speak, not even when you went to one of the bartenders and told her what they had called you and your love.
And even when a bouncer threw them out, they took their time, downed their drinks with smug faces and sauntered out, even as the bouncer told them to get a move on, such is their power to move as they choose to in the world, and soon after you’d find yourself calling him your fiancé and then your husband whenever visiting South Texas and dealing with the kind of people your mother’s people call good ol’ boys, who are actually grown men.
Years later, you tell a close friend this story, and he gets defensive. Even a little angry. At you. He says: Not all white guys are like that, you know. You tell him you know this, but then he examines your face in a way he had never done before. As if to return an insult that you never meant toward him in the first place, when you were trying to explain what it meant to be a mixed-race couple in outdoor, crowded spaces of South Texas. But he wants to be part of the story. Because he’s made himself, his inside and outside persons, part of your story. And he says to you: Really, it’s your nose and high cheekbones. It’s kinda your whole face. Your differece emphasizes his difference, your difference together. It’s definitely your body. You are now uncomfortable, as he looks over you, and you’ve stopped speaking. Your silence, however, is not power; it’s a weeding out, it’s a heightening of the senses.
Your silence he interprets as disdain. Defiance. Suddenly he blurts out: You know what it is too? You’re really skinny and it can come off like you’re kinda naked when you showing any skin, even just your shoulders. Like I see bones. And he taps the bones just above your breasts. Then he knows he’s gone too far. You don’t talk for months. He writes you many emails. That he’s tired of people implying all straight white men are to blame for the world’s problems. That he’d thought you were trying to blame him for someone else’s behavior. That he wasn’t body-shaming you, it’s just that the world is what it is and changes takes time. Or change is an illusion. It is what it is, he wrote again. And after that you wrote back. Because you’ve always hated the phrase it is what it is. How such wording lets the world get away with the same old prejudices and hostilities. Today you try not to think about what he said too much, the culmination of it all. And still today, nearly two years after all of this, you hold back from him, unable to let him near the nest.
*
When you were younger, you disliked writing in the present and future tenses of Modern Hebrew. Not because either was hard to do, but because you believed the past tense spoke more truth, a world closer to that of Torah. And how devout you were, how close you wanted to be to God, who was not a white, bearded man in the heavens, but an unknown whose likeness no painting or drawing could ever capture. That humans, as your father promised, were made in that Great Image, but it was not to be taken so literally. It was not the body nor the face, but the being, the being itself, that we might resemble such holiness. And that it was not enough to approach such a being with all your five senses, but that one should consider how she or he communes with others. Empathy, patience, love, your father stressed, but also— self-preservation too.
And how you’d stare into the stain glass windows of the synagogue waiting for God to appear to you, as you recited the prayers and rocked back and forth, sometimes beating your chest like the old men in the congregation. How you loved these old, pious men who didn’t necessarily love you back, who’d never let it pass your mother had converted, that she wasn’t born a Jew. But you loved them because it seemed that, even with all the complications, they were bound to the very Judaism you wanted, the God you wanted, all of which they thought you could never attain. Yet they did not know your father was a conduit, your eternity linked to that higher eternity. You loved them and felt bad they did not know your father was a great man who never wanted to be great.
That what he treasured most was love.
Even when he’d nearly lost all his family marrying your mother, ever when it did cost him, in the end, the greater community in which he originated. He tells you this now, while studying Zohar together. He tells you great ideas also reveal themselves when earthly love is strong— which contradicts a passage you’d just read together— and that you must protect your love, that love at its most unorthodox is its own kind of sacred text.
And over FaceTime, you watch your father shuts his eyes and you know he’s praying, that he’s getting older and how you want to hold on to this kind of forever, this kind of future in which he is always a conduit, that he loved so much he lost family for your mother, for his children, and you shut your eyes, and feel all over again the stones and dust and dead-skin tears, and even the mosquitos that suck your blood, and you are a conduit too, of a different time, and you never knew, you never knew you could love people so much.
That you have loved so, so much.