"It was love, I guess"
Hi from a scorching January afternoon,
I’ve yoga-ed, ate and showered, and I’m in bed, with Bobby sleeping next to me. He’s nuzzled his head in between my stomach and Ruairi’s pillow, and I think he’s having an active dream because his hind legs keep twitching. From time to time, he’ll turn onto his back, spread his legs out to the world (to the air conditioning unit) and let out a giant sigh – something that various dog blogs tell me is an expression of pure contentment.
I’ve recently had to apply for a visa that requires me to momentarily give up my physical passport. An effect of that is that I’ve been grounded for a few weeks in Singapore. I’ve had to travel every month since June last year for a total of something ridiculous like 28 flights, and knowing that I get to be in the same place for a few continuous weeks has been a treat. I’d sigh now too, if I was a dog.
December was a big month for love. I attended a wedding; my oldest friend got engaged; people traveled with their new partners, and fought with them, and made up. It made me strangely sentimental and when I thought about it more, I realized it wasn’t the actual “romance” getting to me, but all the stuff that came before.
Culturally, marriage and all its attendant rituals have been so thoroughly interrogated that, at least until recently, I didn’t really know how to relate to them. I understood why people would cry at funerals or at births, but I didn’t get weddings. Then in December, all of a sudden, the idea of it – of my friends, siblings getting married – brought me to tears again and again. I kept thinking about the past.
There are so many versions of love we experience before we end up finding someone we might want to marry. As children, as teenagers, we practice with one another, right? We have crushes or we like people intensely, often across genders, and maybe we express these feelings or maybe we harbor them quietly. It’s so vulnerable, and the people who recognize that, who are attentive and gentle and gracious when we say, effectively, I like you, end up being our friends.
Maybe “practice” is the wrong word because it’s not that we love our friends as rehearsals for the “real thing” but that in meeting them, knowing them, we start to understand what it might mean to love someone. How it feels, but more importantly, what’s involved. Qualities like being generous, or discreet, or simply a good hang – these are habits, honed first in friendship. Someone tells you a family secret, sitting on the steps outside your first-floor classroom and you fold it up and tuck it into your chest; someone holds your hand while you throw up from exhaustion or from tequila; someone you hurt forgives you. Those moments are connected to —created — the one where you ask if someone would like to marry you.
I don't think I'm making sense.
Basically, I realized that a wedding can be communal not because the people present want to commemorate a woman’s passage from the custody of her father to the custody of her husband, but because they want to commemorate how the couple at the altar, their friends, became the kind of people capable of loving and receiving love. They all had a role to play.
“We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.” / Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be
I was too lazy in December to do a proper 2022 roundup but since I'm chilling today...
Favorite books: Stay True, Hua Hsu; The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan; The Chaos Machine, Max Fisher
Favorite albums:
Surrender, Maggie Rogers: Didn't appear in any critical lists for top albums of the year and I appreciate that some songs were forgettable but ... Horses was my most-played song of the year by a mile and it will follow me forever. I still remember feeling overcome listening to it for the first time in mid-July, in sticky D.C., walking back to 1025 Independence for one of the last times before moving. I also played it in Rogelio (my baby Nissan) with the windows down when I went to sell it back to the shop.
Hold The Girl, Rina Sawayama: This Hell, Catch Me In The Air, Minor Feelings. Toward the end of the year, I couldn't stop playing Frankenstein.
We've Been Going About This All Wrong, Sharon Van Etten
A late entry to my favs, only because I didn't fall into it until December is Preacher's Daughter from Ethel Cain. It's been a long time since I've been so interested in an album, listening to every song multiple times, trying to follow the lyrics and references, visualizing the characters. I love the process of becoming a fan.
Ethel Cain is a singer-songwriter from rural Florida. She grew up in a conservative Baptist community and she sings mostly about that world, which she still straddles, along with her other, newer persona as a young, trans woman finding herself online. I loved this, in the nyt profile of her:
Cain also insists on living in the middle of nowhere, the better to drive her truck around barefoot and hang out in empty fields and graveyards or under dilapidated bridges. Before rural Alabama, she rented an abandoned church in a random Indiana town of fewer than 2,000 people.
In her slight Southern lilt, Cain expressed nothing but shellshocked disdain for cities like New York and Los Angeles, where most in her enviable position end up.
“Oh God, I will never be caught dead living in either of those cities,” she said over nighttime eggs at the nearby Waffle House. “I don’t want any career that requires me to be there.”
The song I keep playing is A House in Nebraska, a soaring ballad about two people who find and break one another. She did an incredible, absorbing live performance of it that is almost 8 minutes long.
And I found photographs of our school, on the day we met /
I thought that you were so beautiful, it was love, I guess /
And you might never come back home, and I may never sleep at night /
But God, I just hope you're doing fine out there, I just pray that you're alright
Other random things to remember my 26th year: I started swimming again. I started taking sleeping pills on airplanes. I tried (falteringly) to learn Bahasa.
I moved in 2022; in 2023, I hope I can settle.
Our bedroom has these floor-to-ceiling windows that face the inside of the apartment complex. We usually keep the curtains drawn because people can see right into the room but I've got them open now so that I can see the sun set. Bobby's still on his back, snoring, and just released a noxious series of farts, which I guess, on a literal level, is also an expression of contentment.
Going off to dinner now with my parents, something I feel lucky I get to do, tonight more so than usual.
Blessing all your new years with the unabashed restfulness and greediness that Bobby takes toward every one of his days,
Reb