There Is No Unreturn’d Love
When Michael and I walk into the Gypsy Poet, the place is packed with people eager to order pizza. A small handmade sign sits on the counter: Quality takes time. Please allow at least 30 minutes. Cesar, the charismatic Venezuelan owner, sees us over the crowd and breaks into a smile just for us.
“Hey! Guys! How are you?” We swap brief updates: we’ve been good, our families are good (Cesar asked), the pizza business is good. Michael and I pick two pizzas off the menu—the honeyed pepperoni and the Margherita—and Michael asks if they still have Saint Arnold’s beer on tap. “We don’t have taps anymore,” Cesar answers, gesturing towards the broad counter behind him. “We needed the room for more dough.”
Roy, one of the servers, comes out from behind the counter to greet us with fist bumps.
“Michael, how do you get your hair to grow so fast?” he asks. “Last time you were in here it was short, like Cesar’s!” After a year of the pandemic, Michael’s hair is shoulder-length and curly. Dark brown ringlets brush the top of his back.
We laugh, get drinks from the cooler, and seat ourselves on the outside patio. Since we were here last, they’ve built bar seating facing the sidewalk. The raucous and brightly painted K-9 Training & Boarding Center across the street is gone, replaced by something nondescript and corporate-looking. Café lights sway gently over the patio, glowing a cheerful yellow. It’s not dark enough out—and since we’re near to downtown, it never will be—to see stars, but I still think of the song: stars shining bright above you, night breezes seem to whisper I love you…
A year and a half ago, we hosted our rehearsal dinner here. Cesar and his crew reserved the whole place for us. On the tiered social stairway where Michael and his groomsmen had helped launch Gypsy Poet’s open mic nite, family members and friends gave toasts and offered us well-wishes. After the official proceedings of the rehearsal dinner were finished and everyone had thoroughly gorged themselves on the most delicious pizza I’ve ever eaten, we took my Canadian cousins clubbing at Barbarella’s.
“We’re never going to dance at Barbarella’s again,” I say, in a voice more remorseful than I feel.
“Why are you making it seem like this is nothing but loss?” Michael asks me.
“I’ve left a lot of places,” I remind him gently. “And this? This isn’t about resisting all the change that’s coming. It’s a way of celebrating and honoring the lives we’ve been able to have here.”
We are moving out of Houston. This is a sudden development, and we haven’t yet worked out the details. Two weeks ago Michael interviewed with a tech company that we thought would let him work remotely; then they revealed the legal caveat that they can only hire people in the states where they have offices. So: Colorado. We’ll be relocating in May.
Before we drove over to Gypsy Poet for pizza, I biked to Campesino Coffee. Built in a converted bungalow in Montrose, with teal and burnt-orange trim, Campesino was one of the places I spent hours on end when I was in Mission Year. I sat at the bar seating by the window and told visiting friends how much I loved Houston for its generative tensions.
I got a corn tamale with plantain chips and sat at one of the tables in the garden. From my backpack—the one I used to lug all over this town—I fished out a worn journal, bulging with taped-in letters and mementos. That journal holds my prayers, my fears, and my feelings from my very first summer in Houston, when I came here as a summer intern for a teen day camp with Agape Development. I glued cutouts of butterflies all over the inside cover. They were always meant to symbolize transformation.
That summer started with a prayer night held at the Agape offices. A white guy from down the street prayed that we would come to love Houston, and I resented it. “If I come to love Houston,” I journaled, “then it’ll be another place I love that I’ll have to leave.”
I always knew, from that first summer here, that Houston could break me open.
I was taught to see love as a shortcut to loss, so I grew hyperaware that an untenable attachment leads to heartbreak. In the calculus of purity culture, it is better not to love at all than it is to have loved and lost.
But if Houston has taught me any one thing, over and over and over, it’s taught me to always take the risk of love. It may bring heartbreak, but love is its own reward.
“Sometimes with One I Love,” by Walt Whitman
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs).
