lovelings

at its core, i'm afraid every piece i've ever written is about my father

1. Suppose I were to tell you I’d become a thing ongoing. Suppose I kissed the tender swell of your palm as if to prove it; suppose I’ve already done it tomorrow too. Between your fingers, say— suppose I whispered radical secrets. It is perpetual, put in practice. It gets easier to be. All around us, all along, people were; people were.

2. Which is to say I was radicalized by a way of being and a state of doing— and that quality, that practice, was loving— remarkable as it is for being so precious and still so available.

3. Like water falling, shapeless until it finds a vessel.

4. All the world is a shelf, and on it we are jars and vases and bowls.

5. When I was in first grade, I wrote my first Father’s Day card. A template printed on construction paper, waiting on my desk after recess. My dad is…

6. Father’s Day Card, circa 2011:

My dad is… far away.

My dad is… My mommy is caring.

My dad is… My mommy is smart.

My dad is… My mommy is always there for me.

My dad is… My mommy is loving.

7. Korea, in July, for the first time in twelve years: I climb stairs carved into boulders pressing towards the sky like thumbs. Rope paths strung between them span over the frothy crush of the Pacific, ashen-blue waves flushing white as they embrace the jagged coast. I am seventeen yet infantile in my newness to this world. My father, close behind me, points to the horizon and gives it a different name in a language I am only just beginning to understand. In my wonder, I am careless. I lean over the rope railing as if to reach for the edge of the sea, and the wind pitches me further forward until I am weightless, stomach dropping, hair a blaze of blackness feathering my periphery. Before I can tumble and snap my body on the rocks, my father— who does not touch— grabs me by the shoulders and pulls me away from the path’s edge, his voice alarmed as he wraps his arms tightly around me and asks me what I think I’m doing. I am loving this, I want to say. I am loving Korea, and now, you.

8. In 1958, a woman named Mildred Jeter married her childhood sweetheart, Richard Loving, in a courthouse in Washington D.C. Interracial marriage had not technically been legalized in D.C. at the time, but it also wasn’t prohibited by explicit laws as it was in other states. The Lovings returned to their home in Virginia without a honeymoon. Following an anonymous tip, police arrested them in their bedroom in the middle of the night.

9. The Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison for miscegenation, suspended only if they left Virginia for twenty-five years.

10. The way loving sometimes requires leaving home.

11. This is not my way of equating race and nation, but my attempt to say that both are drawn boundaries trying to make strangers out of people who might otherwise have been family.

12. The Lovings moved to D.C. in 1959 and lived there for four years with Mildred’s cousin and his wife before deciding to appeal their case. It was 1963, and they missed Central Point. They missed their small town with its wide skies and poplar trees that just grew and were not planted. They missed Virginia sunsets that stained the wildflower fields golden and the streets disappearing with gentle curves around familiar buildings that had never existed on a grid. They missed their neighbours in soft clothes, who looked like Mildred and Richard both. They’d had two children together who had never known this home.

13. In a unanimous decision issued on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Lovings, striking down state laws banning interracial marriage. When they moved back to Virginia, Richard Loving built his family a house.

14. My mother watches me slam my head against the kitchen floor again, her eyes unforgiving. I scream at her, and the sound is animal, and I am animal, my hands and knees scrabbling on the linoleum printed like tile. She uses a foot to push me away, her fingers still clutching my bottle of little white pills. Clothes I’ve been packing for college are strewn around the room, my suitcase flung open in a corner like a slack-jawed mouth post-gagging. I throw my body towards the sharp handle of a kitchen cabinet. My mother doesn’t flinch, says she would rather watch me kill myself this way. Faintly, I register a trickle of blood running down my temple, and heavy footsteps stumbling closer. I rear my head back again, but a hand catches my forehead before it finds pain, cradles my face. My father’s clumsy fingers press to my lips, and the voice that has been screeching, I hate you; I hate you, finally quiets. “She is trying,” he whispers in stilted English. “Sometimes the loving way is not the right way.”

15. In grammar, the present continuous describes an action still in progress.

16. The present perfect requires an action to have already passed.