Lover Girl

originally published in Mizna's 23.2: Black SWANA Takeover

The first thing I ever wrote about was love. I was twelve, B’Day had just dropped, and it inspired a poem in me. Perhaps it was the heat and boredom of the summer. Perhaps it was the fact that I was told to keep away from any boy in the town I grew up in. Either way, I knew it was all I wanted. The first thing I ever published, in my high school’s literary magazine, was also a poem — and also about love. I watched my mom curiously peer through the magazine in the office when I was in trouble for something I can’t recall and flip through the pages where I’d written the two love poems. My life had felt so short then, I was sure she’d scold me again for writing about love the same way she did when I was twelve and found that poorly written poem on notebook sheet paper about loving someone.

Love meant sex and sex was haraam so how could I be writing about that at twelve anyway, what pattern was I establishing? Young Black girls are policed, read as fast, they’re sexualized before they know what sex is, never given the capacity to feel the things they feel. It doesn’t matter that we come into the world hyperaware and empathetic, it’s shamed out of us. I didn’t know what it meant to love or be in love but I was obsessed with feeling it. I knew it was the only thing that mattered in life — it was all I daydreamed about.

Love was the topic I never spoke about in therapy because it was the only thing I wanted. I thought it was formulaic, that I could flirt my way to it, seduce it, manifest it through my gaze. Whenever people would debate whether or not love at first sight was possible, I knew it was because I’d fallen in love multiple times at that point. To me, love didn’t need to be everlasting. I didn’t need it to be real for me to be real. I knew love was heaven. It encompassed everything I wanted — revolution, honesty, vulnerability, acceptance, liberation, death. No one wants to live forever, but everyone desires love whether they’re afraid to admit it or not.

Love Is a Nikki Giovanni poem. Golden hour. It is heart dropping. Stomach churning. Corny. Exposing. It’s forgiveness. It’s moving on. It’s water, it’s air, it’s earth, it’s fire. It means being seen and understood. It means healing. It means embarrassing yourself. It means life. It means babies and baby making. It is the sun and the moon and the stars. It is spiritual and religious. Merciful. Allah has 99 names and all of them show us His love. Love is the only life force that can transform us.

Love is all I have and all I haven’t had. Of course I love my family and friends, but that’s not the only kind of love I yearn for. Whenever I move on from a relationship after believing I was madly in love, I realize I hadn’t been in love. Every breakup hurts more when I realize that what I had wasn’t what I wanted, and maybe it’s a blessing I haven’t experienced the heartache that comes from love.

Love comes in many forms. Lying to me can be an act of love. When SZA asks a man to lie about her booty getting bigger or when JoJo belts out about a man who’s given all her love away to continue to lie to her, I know the euphoria of the fantasy of love and loving they are trying to capture. I am a serial liar when it comes to pursuing love. More precisely, I lie by omission. Which is still lying. I test the intangibility of emotion. I don’t like the chase as much as I like the hunt. If I can’t have love in my life, can I make someone fall in love with me, and what would they love about me if they fell in love? Every Muslim girl is a liar. We need to lie to function. As we get older and our mothers wonder where their grandchildren are, we’re out here getting played and playing ourselves. I thought I’d grow out of playing games, but the danger of getting caught in a lie can be fun. “I didn’t mean that, I was lying,” slips out of me on a regular basis. I lie about deadlines, when I’m coming home, whether I’ll make it to a place on time, and about how I feel all the time. Why not lie in love too? Nothing is sacred, so everything has to be. And the lies? They turn me on.

Love is something that comes and goes. Twenty-four hour romances in Paris, Amsterdam, and London have taught me that much. I fall in love in the club, at a party, outside a café. I spill all of my secrets, show all of myself, strip naked, then take the train to the next city. I see their texts telling me they’re thinking about me, and I ignore them. I’ve already moved on.

As much as I love the lies, I don’t want to leave this earth without someone knowing the truth about me or helping me reveal the truths about myself. Love is attention, it’s time, it’s generous. I don’t want to be looked at anymore, the hypervisibility I deal with in this Black Muslim woman body is suffocating. I want to be free of that. I want to be seen and understood, not studied and fetishized. I want to cup everything I am and hand it over, completely surrender who I am, share every part of me. م