To Love through Violence

Graphics by Justine Arriola

I have known love to be violent. People would always say to fight for what you love. Maybe that’s why we watch TV shows where the wife seeks vengeance from the mistress for taking her no-good husband.

I have known love like clashing sticks. Each hit lovingly makes dents on the other. Each dent - a reminder you existed.

My mother taught me love through violence. She taught me passion through hatred. To love in anger and despise. I am raised in thunderstorms and typhoons. Violence is a language I am unfortunate enough to be fluent in.

My father taught me love through silence. He taught me yearning through subtlety and weightless touches. My father raised me on love through passing glances and heavy hands - through repression and control, or lack thereof. Silence is a language I am unfortunate enough to be fluent in.

My parents taught me to love like the ocean. To love like waves in a raging storm and to love like its silent stillness when it passes. To love like flailing and surviving and like drowning and dying. To love like the ocean is to be cruelly gentle and to be gently cruel.

To be gentle in love comes not in the absence of violence but despite the abundance of it. The waves crash against the shores only to gently graze the sand as it pulls away. The hands we swing sticks with marry itself to your opponent to rest itself on the dents it creates, marking them forever. The warmth of your hand comes after the excruciating pain my body gifts me. To have loved someone despite the sins they committed before they met you. Sins that would make God throw us out of Eden are the tenderness only you could provide. To know too much is a curse but to live despite it all with you is the tenderness I can provide.

These hands are made for violence, but my heart is made for love. My hands may know sin, but your hands have touched mine. We hold them against our hearts and marry our love with them.

I learned to love through violence, and the tenderness that comes after is the greatest violence I will inflict.