We go through our closets together sometimes, as we do almost all things together and always have. We stand beside one another, laughing as we try on things that either no longer fit our style, or our bodies, and we always say yes to the donning of hilariously silly things we’ve ever saved all these years, or have been gifted by others who don’t quite understand the sartorial choices we tend to make. She with dresses she thought she loved fifteen years ago, skinny jeans she always hated but felt like she had to wear to acquiesce to the culture of the times, me with flannels I’ve held onto long beyond frayed and destroyed, more hole than shirt at all.
We did this recently, the pile of old t-shirts and sweatshirts holding up the haiku in the photo below can attest, and saw again what happens as some clothes become workout clothes, whilst all others get donated away. During this purge, however, we both gained something—or perhaps not gained as we’d always had it—a flooring understanding, a soul-shaking epiphany that re-emerged within us like a slumbering thing finally shaking the cobwebs of dream from their mind.
We saw, with stunning clarity and overwhelming peace, what I believe to be true love’s greatest, and quietest, gift:
The perfect celebration of who we become, the unwavering confidence to allow ourselves to constantly change into those people.
I believe this, and I don’t know if I knew how to articulate it until that day standing in that closet. Sarah was trying on old jeans and hated the way they felt on her, as she has voiced time and again: no one likes skinny jeans. Her style has evolved over the years I’ve known her, and to watch her transform and morph into the person she is today, the style she now owns like a second skin, has been a beautiful one.
She’s overalls and baggy jeans now, she’s silver hair that she absolutely rocks (and gets more compliments than she’d ever admit to), she’s my old t-shirts cropped to fit, she’s checkered Vans or black boots and cuffed up pants, she’s what’s comfortable, always, and this is the foundation of the epiphany we had. With those skinny jeans crumpled in a ball in her hands, I looked at her and said something to the effect of this:
It’s so amazing that we don’t ever have to be anything other than what we truly are now…we never have to worry about that again.
Love’s quietest gift is the rock-solid and unwavering understanding that you don’t ever have to try to be anything you’re not, ever again. You don’t have to force yourself into pants that make you miserable, into shoes that hurt your feet, into dress shirts, short shorts, or any other nonsense that doesn’t complement the person you’re becoming, the person you’ve evolved into.
Love’s quietest gift is looking across a room, into the eyes of someone that holds your gaze, and knowing, absolutely KNOWING, that they will love you despite it all. Hell, they’ll love you because of it all, because you wear old camouflage pants you cut into shorts with a pink t-shirt and black Blundstone boots with calf-length socks on a summer day, because your style is the strange embodiment of your strange soul. They love you as you grow, as you change, as your body softens and the wrinkles deepen and you feel tired more than you used to. They love you through hormonal fluctuations, through migraine headaches that span 50 hours, through the transition into the understanding that you just might not be the one turning heads when you walk into a room anymore, and how that is actually kind of beautiful and relieving and wonderful all at once. They love you as you age, as you release the death grip you once had on far too many fucks you felt the need to give to people that never deserved them in the first place.
Love’s quietest gift is this peace, and it feels like a setting down of a weight we’ve carried all our lives. It’s the burden no longer strapped to our backs, the suffocation finally lifted as we feel ourselves breathe again.
I don’t believe any of this means we ever stop trying to impress the people we love, it’s not that, it’s something bigger, it’s something simpler. To fall deeper and deeper into love is to fall deeper and deeper into the quiet confidence that comes when you know you’ve found someone, perhaps the someone, that is impressed with you as you were, as you are, as you will be, that is impressed simply by the effort you put into loving them in return.
You, as you are, and the courageous certainty accompanying the understanding that you’re enough that way.
I know you don’t come here to hear me rant about the depth of love I have for my wife, I know you’re not here to have me try my damndest to explain the emotion that washed over me like a fever when I looked at her standing in the closet that day, one leg out of the skinny jeans she was pulling off with great relief, and marveled at how sometimes, love doesn’t stop discovering new depths within you, around you, between you. In truth, I don’t know all the reasons that bring you here, but I believe that it’s to give voice to things that maybe you feel, maybe they rumble softly in the center of you, but you just don’t know how to explain it, to enumerate it, to spill it out.
I’ll always spill, and this is that spilling. What rode the coattails of this grand epiphany that reduced Lady G and I to tears was something else though, and it too was simple. We must accept this kind of love when it appears, we must do more than accept, as we must trust it with all we are. If someone tells you they love you, your body, your mind, your soul, for what it is, you must believe them. Do not reduce their tenderness with self-consciousness and self-effacement, do not joke through it and call them crazy, listen, lean in, and believe them when they say they can’t stop falling deeper for the person you are, for the skin you have probably carried shame for, far too long.
Love’s quietest gift is this, and I believe it’s in this softness that we can finally heal. We can finally understand that we’ve always been enough, we just had to find the person that helped us to learn it.
What a perfect celebration.
Love’s quietest gift:
the perfect celebration
of who we become.
Love's Quietest Gift | 9.29.24