love

In The Spear Cuts Through Water, Keema's lola — his grandmother, telling him the story as she's dying — calls it a love story. I read it thinking she was being generous.

The love in it is mostly broken. Misguided. Sacrificial. Love that isn't love but wears the clothes. Plans made in good faith and turned. The kind a war is, sometimes.

Love is like water. Ebbs, flows, evaporates, deluges again. It doesn't stay in the shape you poured it into.

Mostly this book is a desert. Not water. The only thing close to love is the ending: the people who paid for everything are handed back to themselves, wounds and shame and judgment intact. The lola wasn't being generous. She was being precise. I feel like I invested a lot of time to be disappointed with its version of love.