Love Letters to the Great Unknown

Listen to my heart, can’t you hear it sing?

Telling me to give you everything…

Today, my cherub, I want to address something I love about you that may not seem, on the surface, a Thing to be Loved. There is a quality you possess that is tempered, like the glass of a very expensive hand-held supercomputer. This part of you is startling to some, comforting to others, and it is something that begins when a person is young, a slow-growing bud that flowers into Atropa Belladona, which is only for guests. This aspect of your being is something that outsiders must be prepared for through their own knowledge seeking, lest they, through ignorance or self-doubt, sample its berries to their own detriment. Today, my Lion of Freedoms, I exalt above your other beloved traits, the bulbous flame of your righteous fury.

It may seem counterproductive, while wrapped in bandages in the wake of the pricking of Cupid’s Bow, to uplift the ire that fuels your pursuits. Why, delighting in all that is good and wholesome in you, my most treasured, do I turn my awestruck gaze to the furrowing of your brow and the grit in your words? Surely, for a love as pure as ours to exist, it must do so without the abandon of reason and measured word or deed? A vehement nay, I say to that, and spit on the ground such purism would walk on, if anthropomorphized. If we are to survive the maelstrom of this passion, I will suckle on the bitter mucosal sludge that is your anger at the world gone wrong.

I savor the sound of your cursing, darling. To hear you enumerate the injustices and slights that occur is like the crescendo of an expertly performed opera. That bulging vein in your forehead as you educate yourself on the nuance of a topic raised to public awareness, highlighting the toil of the marginalized against a system that has sustained itself on their torment is no less pleasing to my eye than the flickering neon sign at the donut shop down the street, announcing the fresh batch of glazed fried dough I will inevitably offer to purchase, returning to your side to kneel and hold aloft thin cardboard shielding the sticky, decadent mouth treats up to you as a sacrifice to assuage your violent urges.

But how, HOW, you cry sometimes to me. How could I give praise to the elevation of your blood pressure, the pounding of your heart in your chest, the hot spray of tears down your cheeks? Why would I sharpen my senses on the whetstone of your affinity for the causes of the downtrodden and maligned? What possible improvement does your chanting, your 3 a.m. creation of protest signs from drug store poster board and paint stirring sticks provide my life? How could your PTO request submission for a day off to drive your car across the city to lock arms with strangers outside a sexual wellness medical center - whose most common offered services are breast cancer screenings and family planning assistance to help prevent unprepared individuals from becoming pregnant before they’re ready - and be prayed over make my overwhelmed heart swell further with love?

At the end of the night, precious one, when you have screamed into the void, when you have read yet another book written by an author whose name somehow never reaches the New York Times Bestseller list but whose words are like sight granted to the blind, when you have sorted the last toothbrush into the last paper sack of supplies for distribution to those who have little and need much, when you have washed the cola thrown on you for protecting young people from being threatened with the son of perdition’s particular attentions, the burning coals of your fury wane in heat and the ashes fall away, leaving only the diamond of your compassion.

I, cherishing you with wide eyes and wholeness of being, stand ever ready to sharpen the sword of your arguments against a world that sees fit to stomp on those most in need. The hurricane of your actions against oppression has, at its eye, a love that is second only in greatness and appeals to the love borne in my chest. It is humanity, hallowed and only tenuously held by most, that spurs you on your quest for a better place. All of this hurt you feel, as you reach out into these communities, which startled me at first, is not because you have been hurt by that which you fight against - but because you are pained that those you fight have hurt those who have been unable to stop the attacks against them.

It is your hunger for a world made better, for healing, for an excisement of gangrenous filth from a society whose wounds are many and deep, that brings out the electric charge of your wrath, sending you on quests to feast on the souls of those who would subdue you. I am addicted to the wine made from the fruit of your labors, which tastes of equity, of justice, of liberty, and of validation.

I should say, however, that there is a part of my mind where I retreat, while I support you and am emboldened by the power of your spirit, to critically examine my role, my contributions, and my potential blunders. I have seen the force of your vengeance, righteous and moral and waning only when the task is finished, and I suppose, in a sense, I love even this retreat. I think, light of my life, that as you are a warrior who, on the outside looking in, seems fit for battle at any moment, you are also a bastion of empathy, of softness of thought. To see your eyebrows twitch with the first inkling of unrest of spirit, and to know that your actions are grown from the striking of the Flint of Harm against the Stone of the Subjugated, that you choose to be the drop of water that prevents a spark between Flint and Stone? This, my love, is beauty, and today, I want you to know that I love you for it.