In My Twenties, Twenty Years Later
- Llerraj Esuod
- Jun 9
- 3 min read
By Llerraj Esuod
Author's Note: I found this in a folder of old writing I hadn't opened in years. Twenty years separates the man who wrote it from the man publishing it.
I sat with it longer than I expected. I recognized the feeling before I recognized the words. Some of it embarrassed me. Most of it told the truth.
I knew then that fear was part of the story. What I didn't understand was how often I mistook preparation for progress.
I offer it now the same way it was written — honestly, and without resolution.
Signs and words gave me away before I could contain them — visible in my character, in small gestures, and in a burning I hadn't yet learned to name.
Grandma told me one day, "Boy, I see it fallin' on ya." I was clueless to what she was seeing, so I asked her, "What is it that you see fallin' on me?" And to my surprise, she said I was experiencing love.
She could see it in my eyes and in the conversations we had. She knew some young woman was leaving me exposed, invariably and inevitably.
Then Mama offered her warnings: that the woman capable of giving me the greatest joy would also be capable of bringing me the deepest hurt. That a man could devastate himself by making a woman wait too long to know where she stands. That I would have no one to blame save myself if I let that fate find me.
So I sometimes war with the thought of her disappearing — and fear that her leaving would be something I brought on myself. She is mysterious. She draws me in and makes me cautious at the same time because she is exactly what I want. I tell myself I'm being careful, but sometimes I wonder whether caution is simply another name for fear.
Thinking on whether she could break me, leave me bleeding and woeful, Grandma said, without being asked, "Boy, love is a hurtin' thang at times," and would say no more.
Never having experienced real love, and now finding that it has the power to turn everything upside down, I catch myself trying to love from a safe distance — arms extended, heart half-offered.
And the force that has undone so many people — through what they heard, what they saw, what they imagined, through Eve-like touches — I still cannot fully name. The people who tried to explain love to me could recognize it once it arrived, but they could not explain it beforehand. Even after it was named for me, it remained something understood only in retrospect.
What about Mama's warning? That I could be my own worst enemy if I let a woman I wanted wait too long to know where she stands? That she would grow tired before I figured out what I was feeling? Neither she nor the woman herself could know how hard I was working to tell lust from love — and both of those from infatuation.
I didn't have language for what I was sorting through. And so I found myself cornered at every angle.
Cornered, because it is written in Song of Solomon 8:7: "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned."
And if that is true — if love cannot be drowned — then I am responsible for what I do with it.
Admittedly, I do love her.
Nonetheless, I find no fault in wanting favorable odds.
It takes a fool to learn.
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