Expectation, the Death of Romance
On What I Don’t Expect to Achieve
What did I expect? I ask myself, the tone unmistakably my wisest friend, who sits in my mind like a gauge of if I’ve gone too far. She is frequently both correct and overprotective.
I didn’t have an expectation. I don’t expect a reply. A compliment doesn’t require anything in return, not even a thank you. If I am a feminist, and I am, then I have to apply my logic to that of the men in my life who are at the receiving end of my kindness, the gentle words that leave me, and land with some generosity in the landmine of their hearts.
I don’t have an expectation. I don’t require some sort of reply. “You looked handsome,” is fine on its own, surrounded by nothing but a conclusion to a previous conversation, and a blank spot in retort. This is sufficient.
Romance is not the expectation of reciprocity for generosity, it isn’t a hope for silence, to be clear, but rather it is the absence of demand.
If I care, and that kindness is coming from a place of care, then I must treat the genuine nature of my words like water to the ground. I have a hope of a harvest, but I do not require the ground to yield to me, there is so much more than water that causes the soil to sprout fruit.
Romance is a long and patient journey. One doesn’t expect the ground to sprout with the flesh of fruit upon the first drop of water. A gardener will tell you, the joy that springs like a burst in the chest, when the smallest of green breaks the soil, is almost as unexpected as the timing in which it will occur.
Romance is in the surprise, it is in the care, it is in the consistency.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be so bold as to have the courage to state the compliments that litter the ground of my mind when you are near, but there is something ever so intimate in that. As if I have laid claim to the sound that you hear, the peace that you are allowed in the rooms we share – there is something that I cannot but tread lightly within. A garden that has pathways that are walked, while the seeds are thrown from gentle hands.
I am a woman of words, better written, poetry sat in soliloquy, having brewed into something a little like warmth to the eyes, a coolness to their reflection.
“You looked handsome,” I sandwich between an opening declaration to be prepared, a compliment is incoming, a notice of consent upon the door, a sweet notice of intent; closed out with a comment to let you know that it is all I intend to share, so that the person on the other side of the door knows that there will be no incessant knocking into the evening.
I don’t expect my neighbors to be available to me at all times, to come ruffled and bleary to the door of the homes in the dead of night, or the blazing heat of the morn, I don’t anticipate that they expect that of me. We are living in community, rather when we are available, our doors are easy to swing wide, and our windows are open and the breeze is light with fragrant florals, and sweet notes of laughter.
I don’t have an expectation for kindness. Compliments litter my speech not because they are less important for being stated regularly, but in fact the opposite. They are all the more important for their repetition; water doesn’t become less important for the regularity you give it to the seed in the ground, it’s regularity blooms consistency, a reminder of care to the potential of what could be.
We are hardly ever so gentle with our desires, rather we shroud them in demands, laden our words with rough expectation, and disappointment captures our hearts when we don’t receive what we have come to be told is the outcome of kindness – this is the death of romance.
I don’t have a demanding heart, I have a romantic one. One that is often heavy, certainly, but never with what people don’t provide, but rather how many times I have stayed silent in the moment, and stewed with the ache of giving something of a note of gentleness to those we expect only strength from.
Romance isn’t in required reciprocity, it is in the giving with earnest honesty. The truth wrapped in floral language is just the wrapping of the way in which I give my heart to those in my world, and the compliments that I provide are no less earnest in their honesty, with the silence that welcomes them.
I would wager, that the first gardeners wondered with some sense of confused hope at the grounds in which they sowed their seeds, looking forward to a future they didn’t know, and leaving the rest up to the life that encircled the ground and the hand that nurtured it.
For water isn’t all that a seed needs to flourish, the wind, the rain, the wild fire, and the animals that roam freely all aid in the life of the harvest. While my gentle kindness, may be akin to water, the person with which I share such kindness has a life of their own, a world of responsibility, growth, heartbreak, and change that must occur for them to become the fruits of their own labor.
Who am I, but an aspect of what is in their life? While I am certainly at the center of mine, I am not to expect to be the only carer in theirs, and why would I be? Romance is dead if we live in a future that isn’t sure to exist.
Mayhaps the kindness that I share with some regularity, will train the heart of the other to be able to receive kindness in the future from someone worthy – inshallah, I water the hearts of all those around me to be open to sweetness, to be accepting of compliments, and to be recipients of generosity.
I don’t expect flowery prose in response, why would I? Who is to say that the ground will yield fruit? Is it no less worthy of care? What if instead it bequeaths a rose, not nearly as nourishing to the body, but beautiful to the eyes? What if my earnest honesty, begets friendship? Is this no less a result of romance?
Why must we be so beholden to the demands of desire, when the hope that comes with genuine hearts and open kindness, is something so sweet to explore, and so lovely to bask in the gentle light of?
I’ve spent the better part of a year and a half noticing you, before I should, in ways I cannot explain for there are some things that are not for the world to know, merely my heart and my mind.
Is it terminal? I ask myself… knees bent, post prayer, eyes open to the moonlight, the crescent a reminder of the mercy of a God that loves me so. And I think, sometimes, that it may be. This feeling that I have spent the last year dissecting, questioning, abandoning, then returning to, I often worry will be the last vision to cross my mind. One of being held by you, a touch upon the skin, lingering until death, the sweetness of the could be, wrapped up in the shroud of what never was.
I imagine what it would be like to get lost in your eyes, how to explain to you, that they remind me of the exact shade of water in a small cove in Upper Michigans Lake Superior. I remember thinking then that I might find rest in those waters, and now I envision that rest is looking for a heartbeat into your eyes.
And yet, even so, even then, alas, I will never expect a response. No thank you is required, no reciprocity of complimentary prose, the text followed by silence, is just fine.
You are handsome, I say, and smile, flip my phone to silence, turn it over, and move on.
x o x o - Jacks
Note: you one time said that you’d never call me Jack, or Jacks, (nicknames that have been mine nearly half of my life or more), that you would only ever call me my name, and it has stuck in me like a life line I never asked for. Said with such unyielding force, that had any other man said it, I would’ve dismissed them from the very writing of my life, and yet…
Yet you make me feel like there is something to my name, and while I will not end my writing here with my name, when you use it, it almost feels, for a moment, every time, like maybe… just maybe, it’s the most beautiful name to have ever been said.
Romance, is how you made me find a new love for a name I had long become disconnected from. Was this your expectation? I rather anticipate that it wasn’t, and yet… it is no less beautiful the way in which my name feels like a leaf in fragile soil, sprouting from a long dormant slumber, its roots taking hold in me as it hasn’t in so many years.
Romance requires no expectation, and so many things can be romantic even if, perhaps they were never intended to. The world is written by the Author of Romance, the Designer of the very Concept, and I implore my reader, to try, even in the tumult, the heartbreak, the grief and the shadow of empire, to live romantically.
Find meaning in the small kindnesses, and find how much the world will open to you.
some ustaz once said, romance could be doing the simplest thing like taking out the trash without the need for yr spouse to ask u to in the first place. romance can be doing the dishes in the sink so yr spouse could hv a minute or two, resting.