Looking For Darius Lovehall

Love jones . Period.

The movie that defined a new generation of black men and women : Generation X, neo-soul retro New Negros.... Educated in Franz Fanon , Al Green, Malcolm X, and bell hooks. Eating turkey bacon and having brunch. Brown sugar babies. Brown skinned dapper dudes . Going to pretentious poetry spots, drinking dark liquor on ice and quoting Eldridge Cleaver and Maya Angelou while puffing on a L...on some new age philosophy which wasn't new at all. Black power, civil rights, and women's liberation- fed children.... At the cusp of the new millennium .

Love jones. Period.

The movie that defined me. Late teens/early 20s. Single handily my favorite movie of all time. How many times have I watched it? At Least 200. And that is no exaggeration .

I wanted to be Nina . I wanted to live in a fly ass loft. I wanted to be brown and glowing . I wanted to be sexy with a camera. I wanted to be so fly men were powerless around me. I wanted my stuff to be so good that dudes made cheese omelets in the morning. I wanted to smoke in dim clubs and kiss in the rain.

It wasn't about Nina though ....

Darius.

But that damn Darius...

I wanted Darius to make poems about me on the spot. For his dick to talk to me. To run an Amtrak train platform looking for me. To grind on him in a reggae club. To go bananas and throw a typewriter because he's lost without me. I'd be his muse... To instantly connect with his friends. For me to be urgent to him ... Urgent than a muthafucker.

The ultimate romance complete with complication and subtlety .

And since I was 18 I've been looking for Darius Lovehall.

*sigh*

Where is he? I've come close. So close. Dated a few. Fell in infatuation with some. Hell, I even thought I married him. Well read, well bred , fly and smooth as silk brothers. The romantics but not romantic in that Eurocentric kind of way . Black folks romantic. Practical romance. But with an epic soundtrack .

Love.

I'm almost 33. For 15 years Darius has alluded me. Real love has alluded me. Dashed in and out but never stayed. I tried to not love those kind but I can't help it. My own personal aesthetic won't allow me to be matched with anything less. I need a "Darius".

This isn't to say I'm running around looking for a movie character or Larenz Tate himself. Oh no. Darius is symbolic. Darius is the epitome of black man swag (for lack of a better word) for my generation. And I don't think the Darius model is passé . My mother had Billy Dee Williams in "Mahogany". Hell ... My daddy worshiped at the shrine of Billy Dee flyness. That's how he got my mom. My generation... It's Darius. Billy Dee became Darius Lovehall.

But where is he??

I wonder when the search for my Darius will grow old . Am I going to get tired and realize he's just a figment of my teenage imagination . That he's just a character and there are no real brothers out there even close....

But Darius's words ring in my ears...

" Romance is about the possibility of things. You see it's about the time between when you first meet some fine ass woman and when you first make love to her. And when you first ask a woman to marry you and when she says I do. When people that have been together for a long time say the romance is gone, what they're really saying is that they've exhausted the possibilitties.."

I believe in the possible. I'm not ready to throw in the towel.

Darius is still out there waiting for me.
His Nina

Until then...

We write.