Writing poetry has always been an experience pulled from life, love, sadness and happiness. For more than a decade, I have found myself inspired by many kinds of love: platonic, romantic, devastating, transformative and everything in between.
Over the last few months, I’ve met someone who has inspired me to write every day, from small poems to pages filled with everything I cannot stop feeling. She always asks, “What makes you write so much about me?” My answer is usually simple: “Look at you.”
But really, it is not just what I see. It is who she is. And who she is feels remarkably different from the people I have loved before.
I’ve spent years in chaotic relationships, the kind that begin with intensity and end almost unrecognizable. I’ve had to examine my own place within their unraveling, too. Many times, I could see the end approaching before I had the communication skills to explain why I had emotionally disappeared. Much of that traces back to childhood and the earliest lessons I received about love.
My mother was a brutal woman, and within that brutality she claimed love. Unfortunately, I learned to connect the two. Chaos meant love. Brutality meant devotion. Pain became something you endured in exchange for being loved. That understanding followed me long after childhood ended.
I have been physically harmed by people I loved, and I didn’t leave. I stayed, loved them, and cared for them while I was hurting. Unfortunately, I see versions of this pattern reflected in queer relationships beyond my own. Social media can turn dysfunction into humor and possession into passion. A woman calling you names, controlling you, or putting her hands on you can be dismissed as her being “crazy” about you, as if jealousy and violence are evidence of desire. Logically, I knew that was not love. Emotionally, chaos felt more recognizable than peace.
Now, this new relationship has introduced me to a calm that, strangely enough, can feel terrifying. Her understanding, empathy, and care have surpassed what I once imagined love could feel like. There is something disorienting about leaving relationships that needed survival and entering one that asks nothing more of me than to exist honestly within it.
For years, I thought I deserved love that was loud, hard, and chaotic. Now I am learning what it means to experience love that can see your mess without using it against you. Love that does not require fear to prove its depth. Love that can simply be gentle.
And I have been writing more than I have in years. Endless poetry filled with nature, admiration, tenderness, longing, and love. My writing is changing because my understanding of love is changing. I spent so long writing from wounds that I almost forgot beauty could be a source of language, too.
Intimate partner violence is nothing to take lightly. I have carried tremendous shame about experiencing it throughout many of my relationships, beginning in high school.For years, I wondered whether the cycle would ever end. No matter how much older I became, violence remained familiar enough to normalize. I have finally found the courage to stop chasing relationships that recreate it.
Now, I choose slowness. I want to know who I am entering a relationship with beyond attraction and intensity. I want to recognize alarming behavior before I become skilled at explaining it away. Of course, people do not always reveal themselves at once. Sometimes danger arrives quietly. The first sign of harm should be a signal to leave if you can. If you cannot, I hope there is someone in your life who loves you enough to stand beside you without judgment and help you find your way toward safety.
In the relationship I am exploring now, I’m discovering a peace that does not feel false. There is ease in the way we speak and tenderness in the way she looks at me. It sounds cliché to say she makes me feel special. Maybe the better word is loved. I place no expectation on what our journey must become. Instead, I wonder who I might become when I am no longer preparing for the next storm.
I will never claim perfection for myself or anyone I love. But learning to be more human with another person, more patient, vulnerable, compassionate, and honest, has given me the chance to imagine a world beyond the one I inherited. Maybe I can show someone else how beautiful a love as peaceful as the ocean can be for the spirit.
In the end, poetry for me has always been shaped by tragedy and triumph. I hope my story makes you consider what love means to you and how the love you witnessed, received, or survived has shaped what you are willing to accept. None of us are given a road map, but we can unlearn what we once needed to survive.
Sometimes, someone resembling a haven can alter your path. Sometimes peace feels unfamiliar because you have spent too much of your life navigating storms. And sometimes the road toward serenity exists before you believe you deserve to walk it. I am still learning how to walk it.
As always, move through this world with as much good love and care as you can muster, even within the storms.
Bryana is a Black and Puerto Rican writer from Orlando. Most recently, she had a poem published in the Saint Paul Almanac’s 20th anniversary anthology. Her work has also appeared in Women Who Roar, Unstamatic Magazine, and Eros and Eris. Outside of writing, she enjoys baking and long walks on the beach.
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