witness

Define Love. If love were an essay, how would you classify its structure? What do its beginning and ending have in common? What are its classifiable parts?

[[i guess i kind of ignored this prompt actually.]]

In the glass chapel in the autumn Ozarks, with the trees encircling our strangerness into family, you declared your love by sharing its hard birth, in the form of years-old journal entries–you stood on the shore, felt love lapping at your ankles, the pull of the waves, but withheld the ocean from yourselves. Your resistance reveals its depth.

Our two-pew crew grinning glistening, recall how we stood tall twenty years ago outside another church; in its twisted belly our young friend confined with adult addicts, told "finding freedom through Jesus Christ" would cure his "same sex attraction addiction." Lauren Henry's protest sign quoted 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, "Love is patient, love is kind." Decades later, her hand in mine at the wedding, a miracle.


When I met Brock in 2002, he was "bisexual" and this was the "progress" he'd made in "Christian" therapy.


At the reception, Tyler's relatives gave gag gifts and toasts that drooped like eulogies–all past tense in their conviction that he was doomed to burn for eternity. We did not witness the same flame.


Honest to goodness, I was surprised so many conservative family members showed up, anti-vaxxers and Mormons and all, their love expressed as presence, tight-lipped applause, a plastic pail and shovel–a memory of phantom purity, nearly knifing, "Before you made us bury you." Before the waves took the sandcastle away.


Love too brittle breaks.


Brock's dad always terrified me with his grill pit tongs and assured masculinity, judging with his god's eyes. A rigid man who knows straight his place in the world, not seeing how it bends to him. That night in the Eureka Springs Community Center, I saw him moved to bend.


Tyler's dad toasted ice and nothing. "We're glad we met this righteous family." Tried to shake heaven's men's hands over the heads of his son and new son-in-law.


Mr. Terwilleger gripped the mike and a handkerchief crumbled as his face red silent cried whole minutes before mananging, "I love you, son, and I know you love me too."


And all of us in the Eureka Springs Community Center loving your love built a new church to your love and its tough birth and its eternal fire and shoreless sea, raised a monument to acceptance even when we cannot see.