There’s a magic about you
A sweetness around you
A beauty that you wield
A love that makes you glow
Your beautiful dark face
Has not one feature misplaced
Your babyish enchanting smile
Has not one ray short of magic
I love that I love you
Your splendor of a slender body
I love to hold you
You melt into my arms like butter in a hot loaf
I hate to make you cry
I hate that my words will sometimes leave you wounds
I hate to see you sad
I hate that I’m not always there when you look
My sugarchocolatehoneyicetea
I miss you so much when I’m not with you
Yet I miss you more when I am
For though you mean so much to me
I can’t seem to show enough
But when I can and do I hope you see
That my love for you abounds like the sea
Love is rarely ever simple. It is sweetness, yes, but not without its sharpness. It can be warm like sunrise on bare skin, but also piercing, like a silence that falls too fast. At its purest, it reveals us: our best instincts to care, to hold, to cherish… and also our worst, our clumsy moments, our thoughtless words, our failing timing.
To truly love someone, especially a Black woman in this world, is to learn the sacred art of seeing. Seeing past the surface admiration into the soft spaces where wounds once formed from being overlooked, exoticized, misunderstood. It means not just celebrating beauty, but honoring the weight she carries, silently, daily, historically. It means realizing that your love, no matter how deep, must sometimes compete with the scars she’s already learned to live with.
Many people confuse possession with love. But love is not owning, nor is it basking in someone else’s glow for your own warmth. Love is the stewardship of another’s heart. And often, it’s not loud gestures or poetic lines that do the work, it’s the hard, often invisible labor of listening, showing up, and choosing presence even when absence might be easier.
We live in a time where longing is romanticized, and yet emotional presence is undervalued. It’s easy to miss someone, harder to be the person who eases their loneliness when you’re right there. So often, we don’t lack love, we lack the skills to express it in a way that lands, that lingers, that lets the other person know: “I see you. Not just your beauty, but your being. Not just your joy, but your labor. And I want to be a home, not a storm.”
In this sense, love asks us to grow, not just to feel deeply, but to act responsibly. Not just to adore, but to do better. And in doing so, we don’t just become better partners, we become better people.