Page 43 of The Warmth of Our Closest Star

“So…you lied when you said you loved me?”

“Of course not!” I gripped his hand tighter. “I do love you, Peter.”

“Then why are you saying you have nothing to offer me?”

“Peter.”

“Marry me,” he repeated firmly. “Tell me that I need to start planning to fly to Montreal to marry you, Enzo. That—and your love—is all I need. We can work everything else out as it comes. Do you need anything more than that from me? My love?”

“Well, no.”

“So?”

I shook my head with amused frustration.

“How will this work?” I asked. “I mean…we get married in Canada? You cannot stay there forever, either. You will have to come back here until we can work things out, and—”

“Are you going to take a chance or what?” Peter teased me. “Are we living or existing here?”

Groaning with frustrated amusement again, I turned my head to stare out of the window at the gray concrete walls, floor, and ceiling of the parking garage. Where the black SUV had pulled out across the way, a mini-van was parking. I watched as the brake lights lit up, then blinked out. A man clambered out of the driver’s seat and closed the door. Stretching his arms above his head, he then dashed around to the passenger side and opened the door. A woman—most likely his wife—stepped out and wrapped her arms around him excitedly. The two shared a kiss, then opened the back sliding door of the van so that their children could exit the vehicle.

As I watched them, and Peter’s grip on my hand got tighter and more insistent, they opened the hatchback of the van and started to pull out luggage. Their muffled, yet excited, voices echoed through the cavernous concrete structure as they all gathered their luggage. A happy family full of love and possibility. Once the hatchback was closed and they were all excitedly wheeling their suitcases along behind them towards the airport, I realized something. If love was taking a chance on yourself, what was taking a chance besides creating possibility?

What was a life without possibility? Can one live life well without possibility?

“Yes,” I said, finally. “I will marry you.”

A Street

Present Day

Family, as one can guess if they know anything about me, is a dangerous subject. It’s a word and a concept that holds both promise and pain. One that can produce a paroxysm if I’m in a particular mood. In the past, I could be equally sensitive and playful about my family history. When one finds themselves alone in the world, with no blood-family left to call their own, the emotions that go along with it are indescribable as well as nebulous. There never seems to be a way to describe those feelings that do them the justice they deserve, especially since they can evolve by the minute.

Losing one’s family so early in life and being left all alone in the world can carve trauma into a person like a canyon. Though the trauma is a violent slash, creating a sudden wound, it grows over time, bit by bit, widened by grief, until it is so vast that it inspires awe. That was my life. At least for a time. Insurmountable, profound grief that carved a crevice inside me so deeply that it became a nearly permanent scar on the landscape of my soul.

Over time, however, I’d come to realize that the concept of family is so rigidly defined when one is young. Especially when one is young and religious. Catholicism taught a young and impressionable version of myself—one so removed from who I am today that I can’t even remember him—that one must obey their mother and father. That family is those with whom you share blood. That blood is thicker than water.

The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

That’s an older and more accurate representation of the quote.

Though the “blood of the covenant” means blood shed in battle with comrades creates a deeper bond than family. Also meaning, the bonds you create and nurture by choice with people is stronger than the bonds created simply by birth. This makes more sense to me. Through the church’s teachings, my brother and sister were not my real siblings. I knew this to be false. Even from a young age when I felt that family was to be held above all other things. Noe was my brother. Ila was my sister. Nothing would make me believe otherwise.

And the family I’ve made along the way, in my thirty years of life, are as much my family as my parents and grandparents. In fact, maybe, if I dare say, they are more my family. Because they were chosen to be my family. By me.

This doesn’t diminish or invalidate the love I had for my parents and grandparents. Nor does it change anything about our bonds. In fact, this discovery deepened that love and those bonds. Because it provided a deeper understanding of the love one can have for, and the bond one can share with, another individual. Keeping the love I had for my family in my heart was a choice.

Choosing to love is powerful.

Loving and continuing to love someone is a choice, but it is also an endeavor so great that, if at the end of life, you still love the people you chose to love, you’ve completed a Herculean task. Choosing to love someone is easy. Choosing to keep loving someone day after day, year after year, is difficult. Often, even minute to minute is a struggle.

It’s not the kinship we feel for someone when we meet them that sustains love. It’s the ordinary, mundane events, day after day, that keep that fire burning. Sometimes…the fire goes untended. Whose fault that is depends on the situation.

Regardless, falling is easy, learning to soar is work. Falling in love can happen whether we choose it or not, but what happens after is completely within our control. What we choose is what makes love so special.

This is true for lovers and friends. And found family.

Choosing to continue to love someone is one of the most profound ways that I see God. Well…maybe not God. But the vastness and benevolence of the universe. Chemicals and particles and elements…and the dust stars are made of…set into motion billions of years ago, pinging around in the vastness of space, over nearly immeasurable distance, led to the moment a person looks into another person’s eyes and thinks: