I Did Not Love Them Well

From the Gospel of the Unforgiven

I did not love them well.

If you came looking for a hymn, this ain’t it. This is the ash that comes after the burning. This is the truth scraped bare, not wrapped in linen and forgiven with wine. I loved them wrong, recklessly, selfishly, sometimes cruelly. But I loved them.

And not one of them mistook it for anything else.

They knew. They always knew. Because there’s a kind of love that doesn’t pretend to be gentle. And there’s a kind of broken man who doesn't know how to build anything soft.

I tried to be what they needed. Lord, I tried. But I showed up with a map drawn in gasoline and a voice full of thunder. I touched them with hands still shaking from all the doors I’d slammed in my own face. I said “stay” like it was a dare. I said “I love you” like a confession, not a promise.

But I meant it.

Every jagged syllable. Every torn-lace morning after. Every silence I filled with noise because the quiet reminded me of my grandmother’s last goodbye.

See, nobody teaches you how to love when you’ve been taught to survive instead. And I survived some things.

A church that could preach love but not offer it to someone like me. A world that carved a hunger into my bones and then blamed me for being starving.

So I loved like a starving man. I loved fast. I loved too much. I loved like the house was on fire and I was the match.

And they all, bless them, they stayed longer than they should have.

There was the one who read Baldwin aloud to me while I pretended not to cry. The one who could fix anything with his hands but never talked about what was broken in himself. The one who didn’t say much, but always showed up with a shovel when I was buried in my own mistakes.

And the ones I never touched, my kin, my people, my few, for whom loyalty was never loud, just lived. Who stood beside me in silence and taught me that presence is a kind of prayer, too.

I remember all of them.

Not just their birthdays. Not only their favorite songs. But how the world changed when they walked in. How my hands forgot how to be fists for just a moment. How I almost believed I was whole, just because they looked at me like I might be.

I didn’t deserve them. That’s not humility. That’s the kind of truth that doesn’t flinch when it’s spoken aloud.

But they loved me anyway. Or maybe they just saw the small boy inside the grown man who still kept his shoes by the door just in case he had to run. They never asked me to be whole. They only ever asked me to be honest. And even that I failed at sometimes.

So no, I didn’t love them well. Not the way the world writes about in poems, or the way a father hopes to be remembered in bedtime prayers. But don’t you dare say I didn’t love them.

I loved them with every jagged edge I had left. With a heart that limped instead of beat. With a soul that couldn’t stop bleeding, so it just started painting the walls instead.

I loved them with my whole broken self. With a tenderness I didn’t always know how to show, but carried like a secret under every hard word. And if there is a reckoning, if there is a table where the good ones sit, I hope they save me a chair, not because I was kind, but because I never pretended to be.

Because I showed up.

Because I tried.

Because sometimes, trying is its own gospel.