Sakena Jwan Washington (she/her) is a Pittsburgh boomeranger and creative nonfiction writer. She was recently named the 2024-25 Emerging Black Writer-in-Residence at Chatham University where she is teaching MFA in Creative Writing students and developing a limited-edition chapbook as part of the Boosie Bolden Chapbook Series published by The Fourth River. She is also the current guest editor for Tributaries, the weekly online publication for The Fourth River. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Huffington Post, Jellyfish Review, and others. In 2021, her flash essay, "The Blood Remains" was nominated for the 2021 Best of the Net anthology. She is also one of five Pittsburgh-based storytellers who documented the public art project, "Art in Parks" in the city's Allegheny Regional Asset District parks. She studied English at Clark Atlanta University and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. More of her work can be found at sakenajwan.com.
Love is Not Loud
I got married on a sunny, 80-degree day in late September before two reverends, 101 family and friends, four vendors, and my therapist. Not a physical therapist, but the kind that makes sense of my brain.
I stopped short of the aisle to take a deep breath. The church I got married in had no air conditioning and a slow trickle of sweat tickled the skin beneath the bodice of my wedding gown and sat trapped above my ribcage. I turned to my brother, Daryl, who clutched my right arm next to his torso before walking me down the aisle.
I took his fingers and pressed them to the side of my neck. “Feel my pulse.” It throbbed in a discordant house beat.
He pulled his fingers back and smiled. I can’t remember what he said, beyond a silent wow, but his hooded eyes widened as he grinned. He probably told me it was a good thing. Daryl subscribed to the same ethos as me: love is loud. When the procession song, “You and I,” began the opening chords triggered a wave of carbonated tingles up and across my back. Our musician channeled Stevie Wonder and everyone stood and smiled towards the back of the church.
Daryl and I made our entrance and took our first step down the aisle. I looked to my left. Standing alone in the last row of the center pew was a petite woman with sandy blonde hair. We locked eyes and she scanned me approvingly. It was my therapist Hannah.
I invited her months prior, but she declined. “I’m your therapist. I can’t come to your wedding.” I joked that she could pretend to be on my mother’s side because of my mother’s light skin. “No one would know.” But then she showed up anyway. She wasn’t there to make a scene or object to our union, but to witness my metamorphosis. She floated in like an apparition and disappeared before the reception.
I’d been seeing her since the fall of 2009—two years before I met Rick, and five years before we exchanged vows. I was peak messiness. I’d been living in Los Angeles for the previous seven years before I decided to move back to my hometown for Matthew, a man I barely knew. The day I made the decision, I was in a Steelers bar tucked away in an LA neighborhood I’d never been to before. I texted Matthew, “If the Steelers win, I’m moving to Pittsburgh.” When the Steelers scored the winning touchdown in the AFC Championship, my fate was sealed. Over the next six months, we texted daily, spoke on the phone after work, and attempted grainy video calls over Skype. But less than two months after the move, he developed an acute allergy to direct communication and withdrew. On the day he unceremoniously canceled a dinner date with his parents via text, my friend’s husband declared a flag on the play. That same evening when he offered to swing by and take me out to dinner as an apology, he chose a local hot dog joint even though I was dressed like I was going to church. I came to my senses when he went on vacation and made no contact for two weeks. I broke it off in a two-page email and never spoke to him again.
This chain of events was no surprise to Hannah. I had her at “we’d gone out twice.”
My first session took place on a dreary, overcast day in October. I slumped in her upright chair and declared myself an idiot.
“Promise me one thing. If you start dating someone again, will you let me know?”
I nodded with resignation. I wanted to do this on my own—the way I’d always done, with self-help articles, romantic comedies, and getting advice from friends whose dating history was equally questionable.
“You need to get more information.”
For someone like me who obsessed over true crime dramas and 30-minute docuseries about bamboozled women, I believed that I was in fact an expert on getting more information. I had no wealth for Matthew to con me out of, he didn’t have a prison record, and he wasn’t married. He was a loner, but not a serial killer. Comments left by women on his Facebook page were appropriate and familial. As far as I was concerned, I’d done my due diligence. Plus, he lived in the house next door to my friend’s childhood home. Wasn’t that a sign? A serendipitous opening to the romcom of my life?
Over the next five years, Hannah would have to rewrite my definition of love. The love I longed for was an unrestrained, soulful ballad on full blast, a kaleidoscope of butterflies flapping in your gut so hard you had to puke, a 100-year-old wooden rollercoaster that jumped off the tracks, an undertow that gripped your feet and propelled you in a backflip before spitting you up on shore. Love was supposed to hurt before it filled you with all-encompassing ecstasy. Love was supposed to be loud.
My love delusion began in preschool. I was four years old when I got my first taste of unrequited love. His name was Shawn. A pudgy light-skinned boy with big brown eyes and a tight round afro. My best friend, Priya, was already matched in a reciprocal love affair with Shawn’s best friend, so it seemed natural for us to be star-crossed lovers. When the school day began, all the children filed into a small, carpeted area and formed a circle for our morning devotion. Each day, I stood beside Shawn and cupped his hand as we recited the Lord’s Prayer. With our eyes closed, Shawn crushed my fingers until the center of my palm turned dark pink and dug his thumbnail into the back of my hand until it made a deep half-moon impression. Sometimes he broke the skin, but I didn’t let go until we said, “Amen.”
I’ve never been one for reading signs, or, in this case seeing the obvious. Love hurt every day in my house, but it was always complicated by the image of a well-adjusted family. Too often, my father used his fist to settle arguments with my mom and brother. Then a few days or years later he would counter that cruelty with a trip to Kennywood, a shopping spree, or a two-week syllabus designed to occupy me during spring break. Love was a house of horrors that sometimes cleaned up nice for the yearly Olan Mills family photo.
Once I hit puberty, rejection became more nuanced. I spent hours decoding context clues, half-admissions, and suggestive statements to uncover my target’s true intentions. If Hannah had been my therapist back then she might have told me to stop fooling myself and pay more attention to their actions instead of their riddles.
In middle school, I attended Green Valley Day Camp run by two hippies in Glenshaw, a small suburb outside of Pittsburgh. That’s when I met Jake. He was a freckled 10-year-old with a crew cut. His parents were divorced. During the summer he stayed with his father in Pittsburgh, and in the fall, he returned to his mom in New Jersey. We were instant friends and over the course of three years, we wrote each other monthly letters between September and May. He had a special sign off that I soon adopted: TLA. “It means true love always,” he wrote the first time he used the abbreviation. Every June, I looked forward to his arrival at camp. And every summer, he developed a new and very public crush. First Courtney, then Julianna, and then Amy. I was content with this arrangement, because I figured it had something to do with the fact that interracial couples weren’t in vogue yet. Our last summer together, he held my hand and walked close to me before JP, a fellow camper, walked into the clubhouse.
“You were gonna kiss her!” JP laughed through strings of saliva and a bucktooth grin.
“No, I wasn’t,” Jake said.
His denial pummeled me. This was the part where he was supposed to take both my hands, lean in for a kiss, then march outside to announce our union to the rest of the campers. But none of that happened. Instead, Jake walked out of the clubhouse and pretended the whole thing was a misunderstanding.
On our last day at Green Valley, he handed me a tape with tears in his eyes. Listen to this when you get home, he said. On the tape, he dictated his final correspondence to me. It ended with a song dedication. “I Won’t Forget You” by Poison. Until that moment, I didn’t even know heavy metal ballads existed. We promised to see each other in five years—a random time frame we declared at 13. I knew it was goodbye, but a part of me held out hope that our love was stronger than distance.
“You’re a pursuer,” Hannah said to me one day in session.
“What does that mean?”
I’d been dating Rick for several months and I was already spiraling from the amount of time we didn’t spend together. This was after telling him that practicing jiu-jitsu five days a week and driving the church van every Sunday until three in the afternoon was too much. I knew something was wrong when I started keeping an imaginary ledger of the time we spent together and apart. If love was a feeling that I’d previously failed at, then surely it had to be quantifiable. If I subtracted sleep and work responsibilities, there were roughly 70 hours of possible couple time but not a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine boasted an algebraic formula on its cover for calculating how much time was enough time. All I knew was that in the first 10 months of our relationship, I’d only spent three eight-hour days with him, and our average weekly time spent was six hours. But every time I expressed this frustration to Hannah, I justified my needs with what other couples did, namely the ones who morphed into conjoined twins from Friday night through Sunday afternoon.
Hannah ripped out a piece of paper from her yellow legal pad. She drew two stick figures with a line between them. The pursuer stick person stood to the left of the distancer. She pointed to my stick figure and animated it with sloppy “x” marks moving forward. When the pursuer caught up, the distancer moved further away and so on. “You’re too available, she said, “you need to distance yourself.”
This was the kind of relationship strategy I hated. I had to temper my desire to be with Rick. My takeaway that day was that I had to pretend to be so into my life, my interests, and passions that Rick’s curiosity would only intensify. The summer I turned 22, my father offered similar wisdom to me in a noisy Steelton, PA pub. We sat at the bar sipping on whiskies and coke as I shared the details of my latest pursuit—a man I’d met in college who moved to the West Coast to be with his high school sweetheart. I imagined that if we stayed friends long enough that he would realize what he was missing in her.
He stared straight ahead like he was contemplating his next drink order and interrupted me. “When a man sees an independent woman, he wines and dines her until she’s dependent. And then he looks for another independent woman.” He took a sip from his rocks glass and looked at me. “Stop chasin’ these fools.”.
The idea of having to restrain any part of my infatuation was excruciating. Like when people tell women that the moment they stop looking for a partner, that’s when the right person walks into their life. Even when I tried to follow this logic, I felt myself looking over my shoulder at a café, a bookstore, a restaurant, a grocery store, at the club dancing—HOW ABOUT NOW? What about right now? Have I demonstrated to the cosmos that I’m ready?
There was no making sense of who I had to be to woo a man. A man I dated in college wrote me love letters every few days, sent me two dozen roses on my birthday, and had a custom belly chain made for me by a silversmith. And this only after a month of dating. But when he felt overwhelmed by my availability, he would say “I need some space.” When I asked for a time frame, he shrugged. But it was always two weeks. When my punishment was over, I would hear his loud muffler pulling into the driveway of my apartment and he would ask me to come back to his dorm with him. I always obliged. I put more stock in his effusive displays than the unpredictability of his moods. I trusted the flair more than his absence.
“Have I talked to you about boundaries?” Hannah inquired one day.
At this point, I’d spent more than a dozen sessions comparing my relationship with Rick to other couples. One couple I knew spent every Sunday doing NYTimes crossword puzzles and reading Moby Dick, but Rick was driving the van. Another couple had brunch every Saturday morning together, while Rick was at jiu-jitsu practice. Another spent every evening together until the sun rose, while Rick dutifully returned to his apartment so that he could prepare a lesson plan or play video games or just settle into the evening. I had a checklist in my mind for what this relationship was supposed to look like from the outside, and my portfolio didn’t seem to measure up.
Hannah took this as a no. She pulled a sheet from her yellow legal pad again and drew two columns. In the first row, she drew two circles far apart from each other. “This is estranged.”
In the second row, she drew two circles overlapping each other. “This is enmeshed. This is what you seem to be describing.”
In the third row, she drew two circles just barely overlapping their midpoint. “This is what you want. This is what a healthy relationship looks like.”
I groaned. This was a more calculated effort than I’d ever put forth in my life.
I had no boundaries. In my 20s and 30s, I made a career of this. I thought men wanted to be needed. When I showed men who I was, it ended in criticism. And instead of taking this as a cue, I shape-shifted into the woman they wanted to be.
The guy I dated after my college graduation was vocal about what he disliked about me. That summer I saved up to purchase a bottle of Evelyn perfume by Crabtree & Evelyn. Its signature note was rose oil.
“You smell like somebody’s grandmother.” That was the point. I chose that scent because it reminded me of the concentrated air freshener that my grandmother picked up at Loblaws once a month.
He didn’t care that it was nostalgic or that my grandparent’s bathroom smelled like roses, and not poop, so I stopped wearing it. He also detested my style. Every weekend, I donned a pair of brown stompers with a black platform rubber heel that my brother purchased for me in the Village when I was 16. The shoe's surface looked like stained wood, and I adored them. One day he told me I looked butch in them and the next day they disappeared. When I inquired about them, he told me that he threw them away. Weeks later, I found them hidden in his trunk and confronted him.
I thought you threw them out.
“I should have,” he said.
He let me reclaim them only if I vowed never to wear them again. I agreed but held out hope that he would fall in with them and me. He preferred heels. He also preferred not to call me his girlfriend.
The men I dated wanted me to be the opposite of me, and I tried desperately to hold their attention despite myself. I was also arrogant and foolish enough to believe that bending to their every whim would coax them into submission.
Rick proposed to me in DC, over dinner at Kruba Thai and Sushi by the navy yard. Everyone except for me knew the day was coming. He’d called my brother and mom days before, and he showed the ring to a few of my closest friends. The restaurant was empty except for us, and another party seated on the opposite side of the dining area. He pulled out a box and in it were earrings.
“Happy anniversary,” he said.
I’d been growing impatient with Rick. We’d been dating for two years and my 40s were closing in. But he wanted everything to be just right. He wanted to know me. He wanted to pay off his student loan debt and find the perfect ring. I told him that none of that mattered, that my clock was ticking, but he still took his time.
“I saw those at the arts festival.”
I looked down to see a pair of blue earrings and thanked him with a tight smile.
Then he pushed another box forward. “I thought you might like this too.”
I opened the box and the light caught the sparkles of a diamond engagement ring with a princess-cut center stone and two smaller diamonds flanking each side. Its detailing was subtle and unique, like me. When I realized it was a proposal, I was so excited I couldn’t eat. We took our dinner to go, and I ran around the navy yard until I was out of breath—Rick jogging just beside me.
When I shared the news of Rick’s proposal with Hannah she asked me what my expectations were in a marriage.
I looked at her like she’d given me more Calculus homework.
In hindsight, my expectations sounded aspirational and half-baked. I wanted the flowers, the unpredictable displays of affection, and everything to be 50/50.
“Love is boring,” she said. She might as well have walked up to a playground of children and told them that Santa Claus burned their letters.
When I finally built up the courage to ask Rick what his expectations were, they sounded nothing like mine.
“I want someone who has their own interests so that we can come together and share our experiences.”
I thought that arrangement sounded lonely. It didn’t match the romantic comedy in my head. It sounded like someone who wanted me to keep writing, knitting, wearing comfortable shoes, and decoupaging. It sounded like someone who wanted me to be me. This was a foreign concept. But now that I’d found this rare and imperfect unicorn, I had to start telling him my own wants and needs, not by comparison or through the lens of a friend enmeshed with her Hallmark-trained boyfriend, but by my own assessment. I didn’t even know where to start.
After I spotted Hannah at our wedding ceremony, I took note of every face in the church that day. My smile got wider and wider until I met eyes with Rick. We selected 1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 to be read by my mom at the wedding. The one that details what love is supposed to look, feel, and sound like. It seemed like an appropriate, if not typical bible verse to be read at our wedding. But I don’t think I really understood what was being spoken to us that day.
In 2021 I finally purchased a car of my own after 20 years of taking the bus in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh where the city design and traffic nearly tripled my commute. I soon discovered how much I loved driving aimlessly blasting music through my speakers. One day I landed on “Tell Him” by Lauryn Hill, a song I’d avoided for nearly as long as I’d been a professional pedestrian. It reminded me too much of old hurt, but I let it play anyway. Instead of damning past decisions, I smiled recalling that the lyrics were based on the same bible passage Rick and I heard on our wedding day. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does boast, it is not proud.
In “Tell Him,” Hill sang “love is not loud.” All these years, I thought loud had to do with avoiding an abusive monster. It never occurred to me that loud might have to do with the kind of performative love I craved. I never gave thought to the idea of love being quiet, predictable, and steady. But as this lesson sunk in, I realized for the first time that love being quiet didn’t mean I needed to be. I needed to turn up the volume and say exactly what I needed and wanted.
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.