Eye Now See

Photo courtsey of Universoul Light

By Llerraj Esuod

Author’s Note

Some loves tattoo their mark into the architecture of memory—etched in time, inked to places like Chicago in ’97 or Tallahassee in ’02. This piece is a reflection and a revelation. It’s a commentary on the fictional film Love Jones—but it’s also something more. What you’re about to read is threaded with moments of historical truth. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

The Quiet Before the Quake

Some loves don’t fade.

They fold.

They shift.

They wait.

 And when they resurface, they don’t announce themselves—they shake you where it matters most.

Like the ethereal echo of the Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” led by Annie Lennox, some relationships linger in the mind, unresolved, unforgettable, and impossible to dismiss. A kind of love built on illusion and sustained in silence.

The Ache Between Confession and Completion

This kind of love—the kind that settles into life’s abandoned corners—rarely gets named. But it haunts. It shapes. And it lingers.

Love Jones captures that ache—the one that lives in the gap between confession and completion. Not the pain of unrequited affection, but something more profound, more disorienting: a passion that’s mutual but mistimed.

Darius and Nina never stopped loving each other. They paused. Fumbled. Their connection thinned in the shuffle of pride, ego, and entitlement, along with the fear of being the first to reach out, the tug of ambition pulling them in different directions, and the tension between desire and timing. And still, when they stand together again, years older but hearts not necessarily colder—a part of them reaches back toward what has only gone mute.

Love That Reverberates

That’s the kind of love that keeps snatching at the heart. The type that reverberates through time like Gladys Knight’s Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye)—a love neither fully released nor reconciled. A chapter bookmarked but never read.

It sits just out of view, through jobs, relocation, new relationships, and situationships. It doesn’t explode. It simmers—fueled by sensory intrusions: a familiar song, a sudden scent, a poem scribbled but never shared.

When Memory Meets Proximity

And then one day—maybe by accident, maybe by fate—they see each other again.

Suddenly, it’s no longer Chicago in ’97. It could be Tallahassee in ’02. Perhaps it’s her city—or his—at a coffee shop or bookstore. A mundane setting. An unfinished sentence caught behind their teeth.

They mourned, accepted the loss, and still had to reckon with the hushed disbelief that love hadn’t truly disappeared.

Beneath the Surface

This kind of love moves like tectonic plates—just under the surface, steady and silent, until memory collides with proximity. Both believe they drifted without consequence—until the ground they stand on starts to tremor, their constructed solitudes of stubbornness fracture, and something buried begins to stir.

Love Jones reminds us that not all distance is disappearance. Some connections span states, time zones, and entire lifetimes. They survive emotional earthquakes and reshape everything they encounter. Even when time hardens the shell, the heat at its core never fully cools.

Songs That Speak When We Can’t

  He doesn’t text her, but he thinks of her. She doesn’t call, but she feels it, too. And still, they love.

Sometimes, the soundtrack to that kind of love is gutting. A Tyrese ballad—Don’t Think You Ever Loved Me—countered by Le’Andria Johnson’s guttural response. Two hearts singing at each other instead of with each other—a clashing, slow-burning back and forth.

And in the background, Lenny Kravitz strums their pain with his fingers, his electric guitar making meaning of what discordant voices can’t—bending misunderstanding into its kind of music.

Love in the Margins

People with that kind of history don’t need updates or check-ins to prove the flame is still lit. They already know. The rhythm of I miss you pulses in the stillness between daily routines. That kind of love writes itself in the margins—sometimes in a message left in the drafts folder, unsent but fully felt.

A Rain-Soaked Truth

That moment—Darius and Nina standing in the rain, both of their eyes searching, looking into each other for what could be—isn’t just a scene. It’s a truth few speak aloud. Two people, bruised by time, expectation, and their humanity, realize at some point that what they had—maybe still have—might be karmic. It might be a soul tie. It might be a twin flame.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t die. It gets buried beneath the noise. Beneath the bullshit.

When Chemistry Doesn’t Fade

And the chemistry—it hangs on like a song they’d forgotten they knew. A reminder that love, when real, can lie dormant and remain intact. Not pristine. Not perfect. But undeniably alive.

We don’t talk enough about this kind of love—the kind that survives silence, space, and mutual missteps. The kind that never gets a wedding ceremony but leaves a mark deeper than vows. The kind that whispers, “Eye still see you—and damn, I might still love you after all this time.”

A Love That Stays Without Staying

What they hold on to are sentiments like:

“Let me tell you somethin’. This here, right now, at this very moment, is all that matters to me. I love you. That’s urgent, like a motherfucker.”

Not to endings—but to the quiet quakes still shifting beneath their feet.

To the ones who come back—maybe not to stay, but to remember. To feel. To honor what never really leaves.

Because sometimes, love doesn’t need closure.

 It just requires presence.

And maybe—just maybe—it’s time to revisit the echoes.

And yes, that’s alright.