The Woman
Behind the Scenes.

I was confused about love.

Some people held hands and made it look easy. Others said they screamed because they cared. Some of what people called love left bruises. Some love left.

I didn’t understand how all of that could live under the same word.

But I knew what I wanted.

I wanted my grandparents’ love.

Married within six months. Kids. A house. Fifty-four years together. From where I stood, they always worked as a team. I didn’t see yelling or fighting. I saw two people who made loving each other look like the easiest thing in the world.

They were perfect to me.

I wanted that. I just didn’t understand that I could spend my life looking for their love and miss the love standing right in front of me.

Because I’m not my grandpa. And my life didn’t look like his.

I knew my momma loved me. I knew I could give somebody my whole heart. But giving everything I had didn’t mean I knew how to love well. I was still learning how to be the man I wanted to be. How to be a good husband. How to recognize love when it asked something difficult of me.

I hadn’t understood that love could fight for you. That sometimes it meant helping you stand, and sometimes it meant challenging what you were standing for.

Then my wife took my hand, and it felt like a whole new universe.

In GhostHeart’s world, you’ll know her as GhostHeart’s Rebel.

There’s a whole story in how we found each other. We’ll get there. This one begins with the challenge Rebel put in front of me.

I wanted to help people like me. Build a place for the broken ones. The people whose pain I recognized because I’d carried some of it myself.

I thought that was where change began.

Rebel made me look at who I was leaving outside.

If I wanted the world to stop separating people, why was I building another line between us? What about the people whose lives I didn’t understand? The ones who didn’t look like me, love like me, or carry the same scars?

Did they deserve less kindness because their pain wasn’t familiar?

That got to me.

I had been telling her how much I cared. How angry I was. How badly I wanted the world to change. Rebel challenged me to make that care bigger than the people I already knew how to stand beside.

Everyone needed love. Everyone needed room to be human. If I wanted to bring people together, I had to mean it when somebody different walked through the door.

And I had to do more than tell her about it.

I had to tell the world. More than that, I had to start showing it.

She got to me.

I wanted to make a change. Rebel made me face where that change had to begin.