What Love Is

On survival and miracles

Randa Jarrar
Gay Mag
Published in
23 min readApr 3, 2018

--

TThe first time he hit me, I thought it was by mistake. As if throwing a woman against a wall was the same as accidentally breaking a glass or scratching a bumper against a steep curb. Besides, I’d grown up seeing my mother beaten, so I thought maybe, just maybe, this was what love was.

The second time he hit me, something felt off. It helped that he did it in public. We were at a clothing store in the Village, and a throaty, tough woman, her Queens accent a bright mockingbird, told me I didn’t have to live that way, that I didn’t have to let him talk to me or touch me like that. I wanted to climb into the pockets of her thick coat.

I could have stayed in the store and refused to go home with him. I could have called someone and asked them to help me, but who? My mother didn’t know I was dating anyone — I wasn’t allowed to have a boyfriend, anyway, at 17 — and I knew everyone else would advise me to break up with him. But I wasn’t ready. Not yet. I hadn’t had enough.

If I didn’t call him every night to tell him where I was — I was usually just in my dorm room — he would show up without notice and rough me up. There were also things that confused me: bouquets of flowers and nice dinners and candles. Plus, the sex. The sex was good.

--

--

Gay Mag
Gay Mag

Published in Gay Mag

A new magazine from Roxane Gay offering some of the most interesting and thoughtful cultural criticism to be found on the Web. Our first quarterly is coming in June 2019. We value deep explorations, timelessness, and challenging conventional thinking without being cheap and lazy.

Randa Jarrar
Randa Jarrar

Written by Randa Jarrar

Writer of the books A MAP OF HOME, HIM, ME, MUHAMMAD ALI, and LOVE IS AN EX COUNTRY.