There’s something strange about writing honestly about love after grief.
Not performative love. Not he-held-a-boombox-outside-my-window-blasting-Peter-Gabriel’s-In Your Eyes love.
Frankly, people my age are less interested in upper-body-cardio declarations of affection and more interested in preserving joint mobility and avoiding rotator cuff surgery.
I mean the terrifying kind of love.
The kind where another human being actually sees you. Fully. The whole chaotic emotional garage sale of you. The overthinking. The tenderness. The catastrophizing. The rage. The weird jokes at inappropriate times. The nights you can’t sleep because your nervous system still thinks somebody you love is calling for help from another room.
After my divorce and my Mama’s death, I realized something unsettling:grief doesn’t just hollow out your losses. It hollows out your future tense.
You stop imagining things.
Or at least I did.
For a while there, I couldn’t picture love anymore. Not healthy love. Not reciprocal love. Not the kind that feels safe and warm and deeply alive instead of performative or exhausting or emotionally dehydrating.
I’d spent so much of my life believing love meant usefulness.
Fixing.
Anticipating.
Holding everything together with duct tape, hypervigilance, and a reasonably charming personality.
But lately I’ve started wondering if maybe love isn’t supposed to feel like emotional CPR.
Maybe it’s supposed to feel like peace.
Like recognition.
Like someone handing you your glasses before you realize you can’t see clearly anymore.
And maybe wanting that at sixty years old isn’t pathetic or delusional or “too late.”
Maybe it’s just human.
Anyway.
This poem arrived somewhere between grief and hope.
Between loneliness and healing.
Between a panic spiral and a really good iced coffee with four Sweet’N Lows.
Something about it feels right for me.
⸻
The Best Part
(a poem by Lannie)
I don’t talk about this much.
Mostly because it makes me sound like I’ve inhaled a Hallmark card
and it got lodged sideways in my esophagus.
But still.
I have this idea about love.
Not the movie kind.
Not the rain-soaked run-through-the-airport ending
with a swelling string section and a tearful montage.
I want the kind of love
that hands me my glasses before I realize I can’t see.
The kind that knows when I say “I’m fine,”
I probably need a combo burrito with green sauce and extra cheese from Taco Villa
accompanied by a small emotional rescue mission.
The kind of love
that sees me spiral and doesn’t flinch—
just pulls out a blanket,
offers me a cold Diet Dr Pepper,
and says,
“Alright, let’s unravel together, shall we?”
A love that laughs when I forget my point mid-sentence,
and then forgets with me.
Not because it’s careless—
because it’s with me.
All in.
No exit plan.
The kind of love
that doesn’t require performance.
Where I don’t have to be clever or charming or brave.
I can be strange and exhausted
and a little untamed at midnight,
and still be wanted.
I want a partner
who is not afraid of my mess,
my moods,
my maintenance.
Who doesn’t mistake my strength for lack of need,
or my silence for peace.
I want to be the best part of someone’s day.
Not the only part.
Not the saving grace.
Just… the part that makes the rest feel worth it.
And I want them to be mine.
The sun-through-the-window part.
The what-a-damn-lucky-life part.
The deep breath part.
No fairy tale.
No grand declarations.
Just the quiet,
daily,
ordinary magic
of choosing each other.
Not because we have to.
Because we get to.
Because maybe,
just maybe,
we are the best part.
Love, Lannie♡
