What Going Home to Jamaica taught me about Love

Love is not pretty, not perfect.

It’s ripped and torn.

It’s not easy.

It’s not automatic

It’s purposeful. It’s intentional.

It is forgiving. It lets sleeping dogs lie.

It seeks more reasons to exist than to die.

It looks for the good.

It sees the bad and carries on anyways.

I’ve just spent two months in Jamaica and that taught me about love in an interesting unfolding.

Jamaica is a place that I usually avoid. Yes, it is land of my birth but I regard it a mixture of contempt and pride: a tense and on-going conflict in my psyche.

I’ve always wanted to leave and now that I’ve accomplished doing that (I am now an Australian citizen), going back there are fraught with a bout of contention.

There is joy in going home. The place where people love me for who I really, basically am: no pretenses…. I can come empty-handed and still be lathered in pure love. But there is shame in a lack of a triumphant return: that I am not coming home with a husband, tales of professional success or money to spread around.

So, although I am always glad to come to Jamaica.

I never really want to go.

Isn’t it then confusing that I’ve just spent two months there? A series of events unraveled so unexpectedly in my life, that home was the only place I could go. Jamaica knew I needed to come home at that time in my life. She knew that I needed her, as a grown woman needs that knowing embrace from her sister every now and then.

I was sick the first 6 weeks I was there: a vile hacking mucous cough sat in my chest from the moment I landed. It was a symptom of my inner discomfort of being back.

I am ashamed to admit it I am scornful of Jamaica: I maintain a light disdain at the poverty, the dirt and the creepy crawlies. The crime scares me: The people in their unpredictability and harshness to each other too.

They obscure my love for Jamaica like a thick cloud.

But her love is constant. She sits comfortably in that thick cloud of discomfort and gently shows me what love is.

She knows how I feel about her and loves me anyways. She knew that I was in crisis and called me to her breast despite…

And then I started to remember, to heal. When I spoke my dialect, when I sat on a bus and looked about the lush green hills, when I bathed in the balminess of the sea, Jamaica reminded me of that loving feeling.

Jamaica let me feel her soul and know that everything but our bond was superficial.

The moment I settled in. The moment I accepted Jamaica as she was. My cough went away.

The cloud of my disdain hovered. It sat and I lived with it. As my family erupted into laughter at a corny joke my Daddy made, as I drank a coconut every day, as I walked in the hills of my neighborhood and looked out at Kingston, Jamaica spoke to me in that quiet place. She let me know that how I loved her was ok. She knew who she was: rugged, bruised and brave…

That our love for each other was not static: It expanded and drew depth from the potholes, hills and valleys of our own personas.

She taught me that it’s ok to love and hate a little bit.

That the love would always be stronger anyways.