The 30 layers of love and onions
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- February 19, 2018
- 1745
There are layers to love, like an onion, and some of them make you cry a bit more than others. But if you only leave the skins on, those papery flyaway layers, you’ll never get to the meat. Sometimes when you get to the meat, there are rotten spots. Do you cut them out and move on?
It’s the week after Valentine’s Day, and I’m here for my yearly check-in. Did you go all out for the day? Did you take a deep breath and use up all the love words you could muster and shell them out in one fell swoop? I am not a Valentine’s Day cynic, but I am here for my yearly reminder. Indulge me.
Thirty years ago on March 25, 1988, I met a guy. I didn’t want to meet him because I wasn’t a “hey, I have a friend you need to meet” type of girl. I would have rather curled up into myself with a book or a movie than take a risk on rejection.
My friend was adamant that I meet him, and so I kept the groaning to a low level and rode along with her. When we arrived in front of an apartment complex, little balconies jutting out from each one, on one of them stood a guy with a jean jacket.
He didn’t know we were coming over but gamely descended from the balcony and leaned into our car window. His English was spotty, but when he repeated my name, wrapping the syllables deftly around his tongue, it was all over. The ragged layering of love had begun.
Today we find ourselves in the 30th layer of our love story. Some chapters have been exciting and full of mystery; others have been boring to the point of tears. In others there have been just tears.
In each of those layers has been a Valentine’s Day, a day for the eternal misunderstanding and preconceived notions of what this day should be. Hopeless romantic that I had always been, I expected more.
Rough stuff-emotions-deep-inside-yourself him knew that cards and flowers weren’t where the love was located. We clashed, I cried, he was annoyed, I grew up, he found a heart he had guarded heavily, and we met halfway.
There has been no layer of our lives together that has meshed perfectly. I question anyone that says their love story has been without battle because in the battle is where the love is discovered.
I liken it to when you just want your kids to go to bed, and they fight you, turning into the monsters they are. When they’re finally sleeping, all you can do is feel bad that you yelled at them, their peaceful little faces bringing a stab of pain to your heart. Love for you children is a given. Love for your significant other is a choice.
Anyone that tells me love isn’t work is lying. You can fool yourself only for a short while. It’s a choice to love, to share lives together, but love isn’t meant to be shown on one day.
Elaborate displays of affection are a beautiful thing, but love must be spread into the crevices of the mundane day after day. It’s beyond the spectacle where the love lies.
I see love in the way we gather the trash together and take it out to the curb. I see love when I wake up from a nap covered in a blanket I know he’s placed over me. I see love when he sits and watches weekend news with me and I yell at the screen, and he laughs as he sips the second cup of coffee I’ve made for him. I see love when he meanders through endless warehouses filled with vintage wares that I find for us to traipse through or as he sits beside me on the couch for the third movie in a day. I even see love as we fight bitter battles and hear him shout my name — the way he first did — wrapping it around his tongue in a way that I knew I could hear him say forever.
I’m just checking in with you, this week after Valentine’s Day, as the bouquets drop their petals and the chocolate-covered strawberries are long-devoured. The 30th layer to an onion (are there that many?) is just as savory — if not more — than the first. Just don’t lose sight of the intentional choices — and the tears — it may take to get there.