There’s glitter on the floor. Still dusts my cheeks even after the makeup wipes. It lingers like memory, like love, like microplastics.
At the start of the night, it was carefully swiped across my eyelids by Isabella’s careful hand. I like how she does her makeup, and she’s visiting, so I ask if she can do mine. We’re playing SZA; I hear the echoes of two winter breaks ago when we played SOS every time I got in her car. She forgives my dramatism now, too. There are just bits of conversations, in retrospect, I realize we speak in a series of half sentences that are somehow always understood. This top and these jeans or does this color wash me out and is this necklace cute clips or no clips?
Today’s essay is a meditation on love. There’s no other way I can think to phrase it. This month I’ve been thinking about love constantly, turning moral considerations over in my mind. I’ve been trying to notice themes when they come up, or where I create them. I’ve been trying to pay attention to which questions or topics are reoccurring, which ideas maintain my interest. I’ve been reading ‘all about love’ by bell hooks, discussing love and altruism in my creative writing class,
talks about how there’s nothing noble about being the one who cares less.I used to feel so humiliated for caring most, I wanted to win some arbitrary competition of apathy. Revealing my hand or saying I was happy used to feel like giving something up. Seems silly in retrospect, even if sometimes I can still fall into the pattern. I look at my friends. I call my grandmother. I write a letter home. I know love so well. How lucky I am.
Last week, I went to listen to jazz with Gabby and Kena. The whole night felt like some profound emotional breakthrough. Saxophone reverberating in my ears, lights twinkling above us. On the car ride there, we listened to “End Of Beginning” by Djo three times. The song had been trending on TikTok, and previously I had it on my playlist, but I hadn’t really heard it before. In the car with them, it felt like I was listening to it for the first time. The gradual build-up in the song- you can take the man out of the city not the city out the man- made the city’s lights feel like the inside of a poem. I didn’t say it out loud, didn’t mention the way we all sat silent for a moment after it finished, didn’t comment on how we said maybe we should listen to it one more time. Sometimes I remember to enjoy the moment and leave the writing for later.
One day I won’t remember that specific feeling, what it was like to be there, to live the life I’m living. I will only have the vignette I just wrote to read back on, to remember the ghost of the memory. All memories are just ghosts- untethered moments that return with grief or joy depending on the mood. At the beginning of January, I went to Pittsburgh for a conference. It was my first time going to a new city by myself. While I was there, I wrote a bit about nostalgia, a bit about the duality of loneliness in a new place. This is one of the things I wrote:
“I’ve been so preoccupied recently with wanting to document everything perfectly, have every memory crisp, no curled edges, no yellowed pages. I want to age but I want to hold all of it, every moment. I want to reenter the memory and find it exactly how I left it.”
1/7/24
Yesterday, Kristina and I called and caught up. I love hearing about her life, her recent stories I haven’t heard yet. She mentioned that she knows I’m in my Chicago (when I’m back in Chicago I feel it, another version of me, I’m in it). A different lyric of the same song from the car ride. She’s happy for me. It lights me up. She knows I miss home often, feel guilty for my absence. Just knowing we’re always wishing the best for each other propels me forward when I feel stuck. A week later and “End Of Beginning” is relevant. All love is always in conversation with more love.
I dislike being misunderstood. Feels like lemon in a paper cut. Let me tell you what the metaphor means. I think everyone has a baseline desire to be known, to be understood accurately. Recently I haven’t been able to verbalize how I feel super well, haven’t made myself understood. I feel panic about my future and the love I know I have in my life right now. Where does it go when I don’t know where I’m going, where will the love go if it doesn’t know where I’ll end up? I’m sending a package and writing an address for a home that doesn’t exist yet. There’s no guarantee it’ll arrive.
I know that’s really abstract, and for that I don’t really have an apology or a clear explanation. It’s just some thoughts I’ve been having recently that to me, relate to both love and nostalgia. A bittersweet candy. The lyrics of “End Of Beginning” are always talking, love is always reaching across time and space just to speak.
Tonight, I told the anecdote about Kristina telling me I’m in my Chicago. A few minutes later, this person across state lines and with no connection to Kristina but me played a Justin Bieber song Kristina always plays in her car. It feels like it’s summer and we’ve just picked up boba, I’m retelling an old story and we’re both laughing. It’s the first song that played on the speaker, so unknowingly it felt purposeful.
Thank you for reading! Short outro today because I’m trying to meet my self-imposed deadline. I included last year’s meditation on love right after because it feels like this might become a personal tradition at this point.
I can‘t describe it very well but I have seen so much ambiguous suffering in the people I love this past month that reading your reflections on love and joyous moments with the people in your life just felt really nice