LBE is a series of essays exploring heartbreak, grief, tending to old wounds, reclaiming longing and fearing getting stuck there. I believe it is also my first memoir being written (not sure about that anymore). I have no idea where I am going ! But I promise to keep you posted about what it means to write a memoir.
Here you can read last chapters:
Introduction Part 1: new place, old wounds
Introduction Part 2: Part 2: kissing as art practice
Chapter 3: The problem isn’t polyamory, it is that I am Black in it.
Chapter 4: Why be one thing when you could be it all?
Chapter 5: Why be a star when you could be a constellation?
When we first fall in love with someone, we meet them on their porch — the part of their home-self that’s lit up and swept clean, the place they’ve prepared for visitors, where everything feels open in that Céline-Dion-arms-wide-open kind of welcome, come meet me in the light I chose.
When we first fall in love, we delight in wandering through every narrow corridor, every closet, every back room, every odd corner that makes up who they truly are. Every mirror we pass reflects back the perfect image we’ve been searching for. We want to see them—meaning ourselves—fully, with every piece of our heart.
It’s amazing to walk around, our hand in theirs, awed by every artifact they’ve curated for us — the stories, the wounds, the ones turned into scars they’ve reconciled with, the ones no longer aching. But the wounds still bleeding? Those are locked in the basement.
The basement is where the light thins and where exploration turns into fear. This is the place where suffering becomes unbearable. In the basement, loneliness echoes so loudly it fills the whole room, pressing itself into our bones forever. The truth it whispers is simple, it’s ancient and the same for all of us:
You are completely, irrevocably alone.
I still don’t know if the basement is terrifying because of how painful those wounds are, or because of how true they are. When we die, no one is coming with us. As far as we know. We’re so afraid of this possibility that we invented a figure to pick us up at the end of Earth School — the Grim Reaper. But the truth is, we don’t know what happens. And maybe that’s the real terror: the not-knowing.
So in love, we show the corners of us we do know: here’s where I got hurt but stood back up; here’s what I hold tender; here’s where my triumphs live. But the basement? Even we cannot always reach it.
I think that’s what love does. It lets us forget the basement for a while.
And then — usually around the three-month mark, when the love-hormone haze starts to lift — we wake one morning suddenly afraid: the basement wasn’t a nightmare. It’s worse— reality. It’s right beneath our feet. The guide that takes us back down to the basement is the most human part of relationships: conflict. And just like with Grim Reaper, we’ll blame it for ruining the whole thing. We’ll try to escape it. And we’ll have to realize, again and again: there is no escape from the basement.
Don’t get me wrong—sometimes we are the ones carrying ourselves back down to the basement alone; sometimes because we want to, sometimes because there’s work to do. But most of the time, it’s conflict that drags us there. Or, more precisely, the heartbreaking truth that conflict redirects us toward. Conflict shatters the illusion that this person—this person we don’t yet know but recognize as our own—is just us with different hair. This person is in fact their own separate being. The reflection in the mirror starts blurring. If you’re not me, then who are you? Who am I? Who reflects me in this vast, scary world?
It’s in the shock of that difference that we’re forced to face the most ordinary and devastating truth of all: we are entirely and unbearably alone in our own experience, even when we find people who will love us. We hoped, secretly, that this love would let us outrun the basement this time. But the moment difference appears, after we’ve forgotten how steep the climb down is, the truth rises up and hits us so hard we lose our breath.
You know what hurts more than being carried back down to the basement?
