Coming back home

Still the farm girl. Forever the lover girl

It’s the 2nd of May, 2026, and I am at another wedding. Maybe I’ll make it a habit, writing about love every time I watch someone choose it out loud. You could say weddings are the only time I let myself think about loving, but that would be a lie. I think about it constantly. I just don’t always have the courage to say so.

This time, I think back to Glory’s wedding, the one that birthed How To Love and who I was when I wrote it. I was in a particular headspace then, convincing myself, quite loudly and publicly, that I deserved better than the situation I had unfortunately found myself in. So the piece was more declaration than essay. A full statement of belief, written with the urgency of someone who needed to believe it. I still hold every word of it. But the difference between that Jumael and this one has been so vast it feels like I’ve lived a hundred lives in between.

I watch Folu and Dami stare at each other and I smile, because I remember the first time I ever saw Folu in a dress and how I teased her for it. Now here she is, looking so in love, radiant and fulfilled. My mind drifts back to Glory’s wedding, and I ask myself this time, had I written about love again since then?

The answer was no.

I had written about broken hearts. The government. Graveyards. Even a memoir. But not love. Not directly. Not the part where I moved past not wanting to date at all and arrived somewhere quieter and more honest, a real yearning for the depth I once briefly felt and haven’t stopped reaching for since.

About a year ago, I told you I wanted a farmer’s love. I meant every word, and I still do.

But belief is not armor. And the year between that piece and this one has not been gentle.

I won’t go into the details. What I will tell you is that I learned how it feels to realize that what you’ve been grieving was never really there in the first place. Never meant for you. The cruelty of that feeling has no timestamp, no clear ending, no body to bury. Just a space you had consecrated for something that quietly never arrived. You stand in it for a while before you understand that the emptiness isn’t a waiting room. It’s the whole thing.

I wrote about a graveyard after that. I never published it. It was a raw confession of my pain.

So I was at a wedding again.

I watched Folu and Dami choose each other in front of everyone they love, and I felt what I always feel at weddings, this enormous, almost embarrassing tenderness. Because I believe in this. Genuinely, theologically. I am a person who believes humans were not made to do life alone. That love is not a luxury, not a gamble, not a myth that smart people eventually outgrow. I believe in it the way I believed in that childhood farm, not because anyone told me to, but because something in me knows how to tend things and simply refuses to stop knowing.

The graveyard didn’t take that from me.

But sitting there, I felt the full weight of what it costs to love at this depth, toward something that hasn’t arrived yet. To be the person who gets manure from the poultry to enrich the soil. Who replants the yam after it fails. Who crushes caterpillars without mercy because something she loves is being eaten and she has hands. To be that person, and to still be standing in someone else’s garden, watching their harvest come in.

I don’t have a resolution for you. I’m not going to tell you I’ve made peace with the waiting, or that I know it’s coming, or that everything happens for a reason. I am not that kind of writer and this has not been that kind of year.

What I will tell you is this: I watched love show up for someone, and even with a graveyard still fresh in my chest, I cried the good tears. Not the sad ones. The kind that come when you see something true and your body recognizes it before your mind catches up.

And then I stood up, walked into a perfume store, and bought myself new perfumes to make me happy.

I think that means something. I think the farm is still in me and I am still planting.