For the past month or so… I have been walking the track with one of my “homeboys” every night from 7:45 – 8:30pm. At first, it started out as a casual thing… other guys joining our walk and talking about the day… our lives before coming to T.I… and other light-hearted conversations to pass the time. But as the days turned into weeks and we continued our walks at night… the other guys started falling off and we started to dive a bit deeper into our lives, our pasts, our relationships with our kid/s and their mom, our family, our hopes and dreams outside of these walls and more laughs than I have had with anyone else since I have been here. I really enjoy these walks.
We were walking last week and he had just watched the movie “Silver Linings Playbook” in one of the programs that he is currently taking so we were discussing the film. He had to remind me of some of the details because it has been a while since I watched it but it came back to me fairly quickly. As we were talking… he paused the conversation and said, “Let me ask you something that might sound a little weird but that I have been thinking about…”. I said, “Cool… shoot.” “What do you think the hardest part of love is?”
Damn… I didn’t expect that one. Immediately a bunch of BS answers came to mind that I almost said but checked myself and just kept walking silently for a bit… thinking about his question. Eventually I said… “Man… that is a tough one. Let me think about it. What do you think the hardest part is?” And he said… “The hardest part about love is having something to lose.”
This really hit home for me. The reality of experiencing true, pure, genuine love comes with the notion that you now care about someone else’s wellbeing more than you care about your own. That you are giving a part of yourself to another individual and have to trust that the person on the receiving end of your love takes care of that piece of you that they now control. Love is incredible and I think in a way… love makes life worth living. But damn is it hard when you make decisions in life that cause you to be taken away from the ones that you love. To hurt the ones that you love (and that love you) in ways that may never fully heal. To not be able to be physically present and show your love on a daily basis… to show that you are learning and growing for yourself but also for your loved ones because they deserve a better version of the person that hurt them. These are all the realities of “love” for an incarcerated individual. And I also believe that these are realities of love for people struggling on the outside as well… not locked behind gates and walls but struggling just the same (or worse) in their life outside these walls.
The love that I have for my boys fills my soul with pure joy… every single second that I spend talking to them (and definitely when I was able to physically be with them) is/was the epitome of blissful love. But with that love comes the most excruciated heartbreak that I now feel due to the decisions that I made that resulted in me being taken away from them for a time being and even worse… knowing that I have caused them to feel heartbreak because they can not hug their Dad, see his face, wrestle him or have him read them bedtime stories every night… having something to lose… having everything to lose… I guess that is the price for getting to experience true love.
I think at the end of the day… he is right. Allowing ourselves to love and be loved with the knowledge that we may be hurt by this vulnerability is exactly what my homeboy meant when he answered his own question. The hardest part about love is having something to lose… but it is better to have love and lost than never to have loved at all… right?