There’s a photo of me from that day—third from the left, sitting on the steps backstage at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. I look radiant. Confident. Like I owned the world.
What the photo doesn’t show is that it was the saddest day of my life.
That morning, I found out Parker—my Parker—was sleeping with one of the festival groupies. A Bryn Mawr grad with her blouse unbuttoned to her navel. His assistant.
Parker was brilliant and broken. Witty, original, and deeply uncomfortable in his own skin. He’d been raised to believe he was somehow wrong just for being a man with desire. His father, a cold and powerful figure, tried to “fix” him by sending him—at sixteen—to a woman across the river who was supposed to initiate him. Instead, he came back traumatized and ashamed. He told me later, she kept saying, “Don’t touch my hair.” That moment broke something in him.
When I met him, he was 25. Tender. Awkward. Terrified of intimacy. One night he said to me, “You’re the only one who ever made me feel normal.” I didn’t mind the inexperience. I didn’t mind the layers of damage. I loved him. I was proud to be the one who made him feel safe, desired, whole.
But I gave him confidence. And eventually, he used it to test his powers on someone else.
It took a long time, but I forgave him. He never believed that. He couldn’t forgive himself. He just grew more distant, more detached.
He never understood how women like me—poor girls raised in tight spaces with too many people and one bathroom—handled pain. We yelled. We slammed doors. We cried loud. We got even. Then we made gumbo.
His mother never raised her voice. But one day, she confided in me that her husband had treated her with the same coldness and suspicion Parker now turned toward me. I asked her, “Was it worth it?”
She paused for a long time and said, “No.”
That was the moment I knew.
That was when I decided to save myself.
I took the kids to Puerto Vallarta for what I called my liberation celebration. We danced under paper lanterns. Ate sea snails on the beach. Laughed until we forgot why we were crying.
I don’t regret leaving. I never have.
But the longing? The ache?
That never left. It sits quietly in my ribs, humming. A love I still carry—not because he deserved it, but because I did.
I look at this last portrait, my hair just growing back after chemo and radiation. My face carved by all the years in between.
And I see a beautiful woman.
I say that with no shame. Because it’s all I ever wanted to be. All I ever wanted to hear from the man I loved was, “You’re beautiful.” Not just in the mirror, but in the room. In the heart. In the story.
And I am.
Still here.
Still beautiful.
Good read Sharon, I was curious about the Jazz fest, played in, been to many over the years! Pulchritudinous post as well its author!