once more: on romance
love is a mirror as much it is a window
On this day last year, Marshall and I checked into the villa that would be, within days, filled with six of our dearest friends. And we didn’t know how much that was about to change us. We were primed for love and we got it back in buckets. I’m working on a freelance story about our decision to bring our friends along, and I’m struggling with how to capture the experience for a new audience. How do I explain how being surrounded by friends didn’t limit the opportunities for romance, but expanded them? How do I explain about Christian’s face when Emily handed him the morning rosé? How do I explain about how Lauren’s hair belongs in front of the Mediterranean, how Racien handing you a snack by the pool feels like love, how it sounds when Tamir’s brain cranks and he elucidates something complicated in succinct and beautiful language? How do I explain all of that to strangers who will say a honeymoon is best when it’s just two? How do I tell them, gently, that they’re wrong?
*
We were in New York for a week—a place I spent my twenties. I always knew there’d come a day when the chapter felt closed. That’s okay, there are more pages. I spent my twenties in New York and I spent them cruelly and selfishly. I didn’t love myself and couldn’t, as a result, feel real love for anyone else. I didn’t know the trick to this yet. I didn’t know that love is a mirror as much it is a window. I only thought I had love to give. I only thought my tiny heart was big.
*
I love Kim because we met in Paris in 2017 and I would die for him. I can’t exactly say why it’s true. It’s a feedback loop—I love him because I love him. Years have passed. We say things to one another in loud rooms like, “you’re so principled,” and, “art thou feeling it now, Mr. Krabs?” What does any of this mean? Last night, he gave me a long and life-changing hug in the middle of a shirtless gay rave. People were hooking up on the dance floor, fucking, all around us, and we hugged tightly and swore again that we loved one another. Maybe it’s that I admire the way Kim lives his life, which is how I strive so hardly to live mine: with boundless compassion, and on the razor’s edge.
*
Every year, one my favorite writers, Hanif Abdurraqib, celebrates the anniversary of a presentation he gave in 2017 about Carly Rae Jepsen’s EM•O•TION called, “TELL A FRIEND THAT YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH THEM TONIGHT.” The anniversary comes in July but this year he is celebrating it today. Around the time Hanif gave his presentation on telling friends that you’re in love with them, I was living in New York and trying to love myself and dating Jonatán and we had this night where we were fighting, went out, got high, and then the fighting abruptly stopped. We stopped literally mid sentence and started laughing, instead. What were we fighting about? Our brains were chemically forced toward gentleness. Our joke now is that we never should’ve dated. The joke only lands because I love him. Sometimes the shape of the container you try to put someone in just isn’t right. That doesn’t always mean a loss of feeling.
*
At a loss for how to capture the honeymoon in my freelance story, I am describing its details: The morning Lauren asked me how I cook my scrambled eggs; the way Peter set the table with lavender. There is love in these, I hope, I hope that there is palpable love in these. Knowing the shape of someone is one thing. Knowing the pattern in which their long arms freckle in the sun is another.
*
I saw this year’s “TELL A FRIEND THAT YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH THEM TONIGHT” anniversary post as we sat on the plane and waited to leave New York. Last night I got the hug from Kim as a result of staying out too late. I saw the gray light of sunrise at five and crawled into bed. I got a few slides into the post and broke—started openly sobbing, had to have my wet head cradled by my husband. If it hadn’t been for Kim’s life-changing hug; if it hadn’t been for Emily’s texts just an hour ago; if it hadn’t been for how happy Lauren and Max are; if it hadn’t been for lifetimes of good fortune finding their way to me in the form of all my friends, who love me with a ferocity that no one is guaranteed. Hanif writes:
“I want the people I love to not die. I want the kids of my friends to be both immersed in the world and protected from it. I love the kids of my friends with a depth that seems unfathomable, it isn’t just a facsimile of the love I have for their parents. It’s a new invention, a new machine. I’ve got rooms in my heart I didn’t know existed. I keep finding new keys and hoping they open the doors.”
I cried at these lines because they’re true, and because, just a few years ago, I didn’t know they could be. I spent my twenties in New York and I spent them cruelly and selfishly. I hated my body, I resented my brain, I believed friendship was a seesaw to be constantly rocked and never, ever balanced at even weight in the middle, two people perfectly suspended in air, two people at total emotional parity. I didn’t know that love is a window as much it is a mirror. When I say that, I mean it in the way Hanif does when he writes about “reflections that inform you of your constant becoming, and the versions of you that you left behind in order to reach this one, and all the things that might be ahead.” Loving my friends as deeply as I do now, with pure—what else could it be?—romance, has softened the way I see myself and has also changed the way I see out into the world. I put on my love goggles and the people around me, people I do not know, are lit from within. I am in love with my friends and so I am in love with strangers. I’ve got rooms in my heart I didn’t know existed. I’ve got so many rooms left to discover, still.
*
What I can’t say in a 1,200-word freelance story about the honeymoon that I can say here: Those rooms are there if you’ll only let yourself go through the darkness, in blind faith, toward them.
*
And, by the way, I figured out why the clichés exist! At the crest of this wave I’ve been surfing for a year I am left without coherent words and can only scream phrases like, “LOVE YOURSELF IN ORDER TO LOVE OTHERS!” and, “LOVE MEANS YOU ARE NEVER ALONE!” Smacked silly by the reality of my ocean of love I am stupid, senseless, dull, and dumb. I am awash and bewildered. I am laughing in Jonatán’s face, mid argument. I am encapsulated in Kim’s long and life-changing hug. I am on the honeymoon again, surrounded by my new husband and six of my perfect friends. I know the way their arms freckle in the sun. I love them devotedly because of their spots.
*
Hanif also writes in this year’s anniversary post: “But look! How much pleasure is on the other side of that which only momentarily torments you!” I wish I could have read these words and believed in them in 2017 when I was 24 but I didn’t, and so I must make up for lost time at 32.
*
We saw Magnolia at the Metrograph last Monday night—Marshall’s first time seeing it. I was bedraggled and hungover and still I cried at the big scene when Quiz Kid Donnie Smith says, through a mouth of bleeding teeth, “I really do have so much love to give, I just don't know where to put it!” The scene makes me cry because there are times in my life when I have felt that: an overflow of wayward passion, a desire to love with nowhere to put it. Now I know exactly where it goes. I give it to my friends, and they give it right back to me.
oh my god. it’s so good, every word.