Love is the greatest feeling that has ever happened to mankind, and it remains just as real to those who've never had it. It's an extraordinary feeling that touches every part of a life, moral, social, physical, emotional, spiritual. Love doesn't arrive like wind, coming and going; we feel it as we live through it. As a baby grows, so does love, slowly, one step at a time, the way a child learns to walk before it runs. From the first flicker of feeling inside us, to the courage to finally say hello to someone we love, to the slow work of building a real connection, that's how love becomes, eventually, passion.
Passion is the state of being moved or acted upon by something outside yourself, something that isn't part of your ordinary nature or habits. There's a deep connection between love and passion, one leads naturally to the other, in a way that only really makes sense to people who've lived through it. When you're truly passionate about something or someone, it's almost certain that passion will eventually deepen into love. I've felt this myself with something as simple as football, my passion for the game grew, over time, into something I'd honestly call love for it. So it isn't wrong to say love and passion are, in some sense, the same thing; logically, they're deeply connected.
From the beginning of creation, the world has turned on love and passion together. God himself is passionate about humanity, and that passion became love in the clearest way imaginable, sending His only Son to save us. A friend once sent me a message that put it simply:
"Think about this: how would you feel if you never received any communication from the person you loved? Wouldn't you feel left out? How would you feel if you never received a note, not even a quick one, from the person dearest to you? Or if your spouse hardly said a word to you all day? When I don't hear from you, it breaks my heart, it makes me wonder if you really need me. Communicate, and don't forget me; prayer is communication."
I sat with that message a long time. What struck me was simple: how could a day pass without a prayer, without even a small hello to God? Reading it over, I understood something about jealousy, God is jealous, and that's written plainly into the Ten Commandments. When you love someone deeply, you can't help being protective of what goes against your will for them; no one wants to share what matters most to them. It's a natural feeling, and maybe the sweetest thing about love, not wanting anyone else near what's yours. My mother used to say passion brings hope, and I didn't understand what she meant until I grew more spiritually aware and started to see it for myself: real passion for anything always carries a thread of jealousy in it. I had a close friend, Aloysius, and at school I never wanted anyone getting too close to him, that possessiveness was jealousy, plain and simple, born out of how much we cared about each other. When you mix passion with love carelessly, without handling it gently, you can lose your footing. Done well, though, the combination is extraordinary, it gives you the sense that you can meet any challenge, that you're standing at the top of the world. That's what passion does, and it's why I try to bring it fully into everything I do.
There's a passage about passion my mother used to read to me, one that always carried a lot of weight:
"To achieve something great in the world, you need to be passionate enough to fulfill your vision. Great leaders are made of passion. Whatever it is, you must find the passion within you. If passion drives us, let reason hold the reins. Follow your passion always, and success will follow you. Never underestimate the power of passion. Without passion, religion is spiritless. Without passion, history is meaningless. Without passion, art is useless. Follow your passion, and success will follow you always. When you take up a mission with passion, there are no dreams too large, no innovation unimaginable, no frontier beyond reach. Our passions are the winds that fill our sails; reason is the hand that steers. Without wind the vessel wouldn't move; without a hand at the helm, she'd be lost. There is no end and no beginning, there is only the passion of life. Passion is universal to humanity; passion is the genesis of genius. Dreams are inspired by passion. Draw your passion from your dreams, and excellence will follow."
The first time she read that to me I was around five, lying in bed, unable to sleep. She asked if she could read me a "passion life story," as she called it, and I said yes, since I always loved when she read to me before bed. I'd heard the word "passion" before, in films mostly, but never understood what it meant. I fell asleep before I could ask. The next day, as always, she asked what I remembered. "Passion," I told her. She asked what it meant, and I admitted I didn't know. She smiled and explained it to me using football, since she knew how much I loved the game, and because she explained it that way, tied to something I already understood, I never forgot it. She told me that one day I'd find something I loved even more than football. I told her God would always come first for me. "He should," she said, "for a Christian raised in a Christian home." I told her nothing would ever come before my love for the game. "Don't say never, my treasure," she said. "It's only a matter of time before my words come true, and by then, I might not be here to see it. But you'll remember I told you."
What I didn't understand until much later was that she'd been carrying an illness she'd kept from me for a long time. She must have known, even then, that she wouldn't be around forever, and maybe that's why she pushed my growth the way she did. It's true what they say, mothers know their children completely, including when they're lying and when they're not, and often seem to sense their futures before anyone else can. Eventually she was gone, and what she left behind were her stories, her words, her love, a whole life written and painted onto my heart.
The passion I'd once given entirely to football eventually found somewhere else to go, someone outside my own family. What I felt for Elizabeth was that same intensity, grown day by day, until it became something close to fire, something I could rarely put into words even when asked directly. Passion, when it takes hold of a mind fully, starts to dictate everything: the way you act, the words you choose, the mental and physical stamina you bring to whatever's in front of you. In youth especially, it can tip into something stranger, you start imagining illnesses that aren't there, building entire fictions in your head that end up controlling your thinking. In that state, it wouldn't be surprising to end up convinced you're sick when you aren't.
Elizabeth is one of the finest people I've ever known. I say that because I love her, but even without that, she'd still be exactly that: a genuinely great person, full of love and passion, and it shows in how she treats everyone, not just me. Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm not an easy person to read. Some friends say I carry too much pride; others find me too quiet to approach. I don't know if either is entirely true, but I do know I'm not someone you can understand quickly, even most of my own family doesn't fully know what I'm made of, or capable of. People assume they've measured my potential and are usually wrong. I've laughed when others cried, and cried when others laughed, and I know that confuses people. Even my family, aside from my aunt, whom I love dearly, has struggled to fully understand me, though, oddly, my friends often manage it better than my own relatives do.
Passion makes me laugh, and it makes me cry, though most people assume crying means sadness, and I don't entirely agree. I've truly been sad only once in my life: the day my mother, Margaret, passed away. I wasn't sad simply because she was gone. I was sad because it marked the end of a particular kind of person, the city girl who knew every part of me, a true friend who brought life wherever she went. I was sad because I'd never again hear her stories and poems, not because I'd lost my mother in the ordinary sense. To me, her death marked a beginning too, the moment I had to start producing, myself, everything she'd poured into me over the years; the birth of stories that had always technically been mine to tell.
She used to say great people are made of passion, not honor or rejection, but the boiling thing inside us that we have to pull out and shape into something. Our dreams, she said, are just fiction our minds produce while we sleep, and sometimes they carry real signs of what's coming, though we usually let them pass without realizing it. It's passion that brings those dreams back to us once we're awake, that keeps us chasing what we want until it becomes real, in ordinary life and in matters of the heart alike, right up until, as she used to put it, "we put the last nail in the box", meaning marriage.
That passion is what carried me through, even when people talked me down. When everyone assumed I was destined to fail, passion kept my head up. I used to sit and think, remembering the stories written at the back of my mind, painted on my heart. When I met Elizabeth, who shared certain qualities with my mother, I found myself thinking of her more and more, and that thinking pushed me toward writing it all down. The more I thought about what friends and family used to say about my character (how mysterious I was, how unusual) the more I recognized my mother living on inside me. She was the kind of person who could say something to you and it would take weeks to understand it fully; that was her, exactly, and I inherited it. Once, watching a sermon, I heard the pastor describe telling a grieving girl that her mother wasn't really inside the casket in front of her, that only the physical body remained there, while the real person had already moved on somewhere else. It sounds strange to some, but to a mind like mine, it made complete sense: people don't really die unless they choose to. We move on to somewhere better than this. Since then, even at funerals, I find myself smiling, quietly celebrating that the person has arrived somewhere good, whatever anyone else makes of that.
That belief is what passion has built in me, the drive to follow my own path no matter what stands in the way, no matter what others think. I've watched dream after dream become real simply by refusing to let go of it, and that's still what I enjoy most. I try, as much as I can, to avoid sadness and the environments that breed it, even with the people I love most. I remember April 1st, 2009, clearly, Elizabeth called that morning to tell me her own mother had died. I felt for her deeply, and it should have made me sad, but I refused to let it. I smiled after we hung up, sitting in the computer lab, thinking through what to do, my first instinct was to go straight to her, but I've never done well around visible grief. I thought about calling her back, but knew it would likely make me cry too, since I understood exactly the pain she was in, having lost my own mother young. I sent my nephew a message asking him to top up my phone credit so I could call and console her, which he did, though in the end I couldn't bring myself to call, and sent a message instead. I knew that might cause problems between us, but the environment of grief was one I genuinely couldn't sit inside, so instead I sent her something meant to lift her spirits. That evening I finally went to sit with her, though I still couldn't let myself break down with everyone else. The next morning I called to explain why I hadn't managed it the night before. She asked me every "why" question she had, and I stayed quiet through all of it. I knew how much she needed me there, but I also knew that in that kind of sadness, I risked making light of things in a way that would only make it worse.
A friend once accused me of being stone-hearted for this. But life asks us to choose, constantly, and to go with whatever choice serves best, even when the choosing itself is difficult, sometimes out of fear, sometimes out of not wanting to disappoint the people we love. Fear, I think, is the strongest enemy any of us carries, and the strange thing is that it lives entirely within us. My pastor always tells me to resist fear and it will leave, and that's what I try to do. Sadness is a form of fear, so the moment I sense it coming, I do what I can to avoid it, because I remember what it was like to live inside that feeling regularly, and I have no intention of going back. Happiness is what I choose, consistently; I've been known to lie in bed smiling for no visible reason, or catch myself smiling mid-conversation with no one around. I remember once, walking down Lumumba Avenue talking to myself, a woman walking toward me smiled, apparently assuming I was speaking to her. I smiled back without meaning to, she said good morning, and I kept walking, only realizing afterward what must have happened. I laughed out loud at that, loud enough that people around me probably thought I'd lost my mind. It isn't exactly normal, talking to yourself in public, but to me it's simply a form of stress management, a way of keeping my head up in the middle of a street full of tired, unhappy faces, before their mood has a chance to become mine too.
My mother always said the most beautiful, understanding people are the ones with genuinely passionate character, and I've found that to be true. Some people call passionate people weak, mistaking our depth of feeling and our gentleness for softness. In a world where everyone's entitled to their opinion, only the person themselves really knows what they're made of. We're not easily shaken, even if we're easily moved. Our judgment tends to be sound, our patience for listening real, and when it comes time to weigh things, we tend to weigh every option before deciding, that, too, is passion.
What I felt for Elizabeth went beyond passion in the ordinary sense. Some people at home assumed she was simply driving my choices, and maybe, in a way, she was, passionate people are led by their passions, and that's exactly what we make of ourselves. I've always tried to give everyone around me the best of what I have, to help wherever I can, even when I doubt I'm capable of it, because that's what passion asks of you. People have called me over-ambitious for taking on things well beyond what my age suggested I should, and they were right, in a sense, because that's simply what passionate people do: take on challenges regardless of size, and give everything, one hundred percent, because that's the only way passion knows how to move. I loved Elizabeth because she was beautiful, and because I wasn't willing to let that kind of love go for anything. We're meant, the old story goes, to love and be loved, and this was my chance to live that fully. That passionate love felt like leaving a piece of myself somewhere she'd always be able to find, her fingerprints resting somewhere inside me permanently, her memory something I could still hear echoing no matter how far apart we were.
I pity people who never experience real love, because when you're in it, you have everything you could ever want, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and otherwise. There's only one real happiness in life: to love and be loved. My passionate love for Elizabeth was a journey that began at forever and, I hoped, would end at never. My mother once told me it's true, we love life not because we're used to living, but because we're used to loving; there's always some madness in love, and some reason hidden in that madness. I was still too young then to fully understand her riddles, the way she'd tell you something at a level you weren't yet ready for and simply say, when you asked what she meant, "It's fine if you don't understand now, one day you will remember, and it will all make sense." It frustrated me at the time, but she always knew how to settle me. Today I remember nearly everything she ever told me, down to the dates. I understand now what she meant: people love life not from habit, but from the habit of loving, and there is madness in love just as there's reason hidden inside that madness, even if it takes years to fully understand why that's true, and why it's worth living for.
It's Easter as I write this, and days like this always meant something different back when my mother was still here, every festive day left its own mark on my memory, one I can still measure the present against. I loved these days and always looked forward to them, knowing something would happen at home worth remembering. Now, my Easter is mostly between me and God. Christmas wasn't quite like this either, with Elizabeth, things might look different, but she's far from where I am. I don't think I'm the only one missing someone on a day like this; for Elizabeth, this is also one of the holidays she now spends without her own mother, only her second one without her. Whatever's happened, I don't regret any of it, because I'm no longer someone who lives inside wishing. However much I miss my mother, I still have my passion, my love, my constant companions.
It's the kind of afternoon when everyone's finished eating, the streets filling with people heading out to enjoy themselves, clubs filling to capacity, some people already traveled upcountry to be with family, others working straight through, because it's their money and their right to spend the day however they choose. My mother used to say: when you're happy, don't assume the whole world is happy with you, somewhere, someone is crying; somewhere, in a hospital, someone is dying; somewhere on the road, a car is crashing, at this very moment, while you celebrate. "So, my treasure, think of the world. Let yourself be driven by passion, and life will be easier for you, and God will be proud of you for it." I remember my sixth birthday, spent on the phone with her because I was away at school. Today, sitting in this chair, I think back on those moments and thank God for them, even as my mind keeps circling back to Elizabeth. I try to push past it, but passion doesn't let go that easily, even the music playing from my laptop somehow finds its way back to her. That's the strange thing about passion: it takes you wherever it wants, toward the people and places you actually want, whether or not you're ready to go there. Right now, Elizabeth is physically far from me, far from the capital, and though I can't reach her in person, I feel close to her all the same. I'm built from these things (passion, love) and it's passion that keeps me reaching for what I love. I pity anyone without it, because my hopes, my wishes, my desire, all of it runs on that same fuel; it's the quiet, steady thing keeping joy alive in me.
There's something almost funny about how people approach love today, writing lists of what they want in a partner, convinced they know exactly what their heart wants. I laugh at that, honestly, because the heart isn't something you can plan for on paper. Our eyes are drawn to what's visually pleasing, but the heart wants something different entirely, insight, not appearance. Some people say they use their eyes to choose, and they're mistaken; the eyes are only windows, and windows can't decide anything on their own. It's the heart that decides, and once it says yes, no amount of resistance changes that. The same logic, I think, explains how people believe in God without ever seeing Him physically, it happens through the heart, the same place our spirit lives. Try, once, to go against what your heart genuinely wants, and see what happens. That's passion too, in its own way, never letting your eyes convince you of something your heart never actually confirmed. When I first saw Elizabeth, my eyes told me nothing on their own; it was only once she'd truly reached my heart that I understood what I was looking at, and from there I did everything I could to have her in my life, however long that took, however hard it turned out to be. That's the beautiful, complicated thing about love, it isn't so different in the spiritual sense either. Once God calls you to something, He tends to wrestle you toward it whether you're ready or not, the way Jonah found out. That kind of pull doesn't come by chance; it's stirred from somewhere much deeper than luck.
I've tried, more than once, to forget Elizabeth, and I've never managed it, because what I feel isn't simple affection, it's passion, and you can resist love sometimes, but you can't resist passion the same way. Passion is what passionate people are made of, the way an engine is simply part of what makes a car a car. The times I tried hardest to forget her were the times I was most convinced love was hurting me, but looking back, I don't think that was ever really true. It was her, and thinking of her, that kept me moving forward the whole time. People say love hurts; I've come to disagree. Real love doesn't hurt, it inspires, it motivates, it carries you from one place to the next, and that's exactly what I experienced with Elizabeth, even in the moments that felt, at the time, like being hurt. Today I sit in this chair at home and put real life into writing, love as the inspiration, hope as what's driven it all along.