Love

Everything beautiful hurts

Spontaneous love makes a person free and at the next moment dependent. It is just as with a person’s coming into existence; by coming into existence, by becoming a self, he becomes free, but at the next moment he is dependent on this self.

Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

This newsletter was supposed to be about love.

But I can't stop thinking about how all of my letters start with a list of ways that I've fucked up.

I could tell myself I'm trying to be relatable. I'm trying to make people understand that I have some idea of what I'm talking about. These letters are not written to other people so much as myself, a reminder of how easy it can be to fail. How every revelation I've had has been hard-earned, wrested from the jaws of pain. I'm a mess. I'm stupid and erratic, often confused. And I'm not saying this in a modest way - to make myself appear less arrogant than I actually am. I've done things so stupid they'd probably leave an ordinary person breathless.

I've lost count of the times I've gotten an angry message or email telling me that I'm a privileged little idiot, a baby Marie Antoinette, a wannabe queen of cake, and feel-good platitudes. I'm a stuck-up bitch, narcissistic TERF conservative whore who never experienced real pain in her life.

So I offer my mistakes up as an offering, as evidence. I'm not trying to look down on anyone or claim that I have special knowledge.

But there's a slithering voice in the back of my head, a voice that speaks from the dirt with a flash of green and the pungent smell of rot unearthed:

Tell them the real reason you debase yourself in front of them.

Right. What was I saying?

This newsletter was supposed to be about love.

When I think of love, the first thought that comes to mind isn't my precious daughter or my husband. It's not my family or the light of God illuminating a meadow full of bunnies and flowers in a resplendent epiphany. It's the wet, warm smell of the woods after it's rained, with the lingering scent of liquid trash that's leaked from a dumpster. It's my shoes caked in mud, sticky burrs all over the laces, knees knocked together, topless, cold but too excited and fearful to shiver. I am nineteen years old, and a man is standing in the shadow of the trees. I can no longer see his face, but I was so sure I loved him. I thought he'd be able to transform me out of my awkward skin, he'd be able to blow on the wounded parts of my soul and fill me with healing air.

But this probably isn't the first letter of mine you've read. You already know it didn't work out like that.

I didn't understand what love meant. All the descriptions of love I'd read never seemed to do it justice. I couldn't grapple with its abstraction. In church, we praised God with love, but when I reached inside me, I couldn't feel the kind of passion that existed in the songs we sang.

So I mistook love for a good feeling and when the good feeling was gone, I thought I'd fallen out of love. But the truth is I was never in love in the first place.

Why can't I write about love? Why do I have to write around it, wreck myself with ancient memories, mouth flooding with a bad taste, and describe all the things that it's not?

I still don't know how to write about love. I feel wholly unqualified. I know that I’ve felt it intensely and completely, so I was willing to throw my life away for someone I’d just met. I’ve felt love in a possessive sense, like when I first met my dog The Kid and somehow knew, out of the thousands of dogs I’d looked at, that he was supposed to belong to me. I’ve had revelations about love on the edge of meditation, where I saw that love was the substrate of all living things and that reality itself was a living entity that formed the building blocks of love in the molecular factories of stars.

And then when my baby girl was born I thought, ah yes, finally, this is love. I get it now. This is the pivotal moment that transforms every moment that came before. I couldn’t go backward in time to fix my broken childhood and my bad ideas that’d bloomed around me, forming a kind of exoskeleton of habits that became my personality disorder. Love did not reach backward into fantasy, to heal the inner child, to shower a memory with compassion. (A distorted memory that might not even be real.) It always moved forward. It created life to beget more life.

I thought I understood love when I saw how much Robert loved me, actually loved me, in a way that none of the men before him ever had. But in the next moment, I realized I didn’t understand a damn thing. Even though I felt intensely for him, I couldn’t replicate what he’d done for me. I couldn’t love him in the same way. I didn’t understand how. I couldn’t even scratch the surface of its depth. To even try made me feel silly, unworthy, ignorant.

So, I go back to writing about what love is not.

I go back to writing about my mistakes.

I used to think that love would fix me. Maybe that's not such a stupid thing to think, because it was the lack of love that broke me. But I didn’t want to love someone. I wanted someone to love me. I wanted them to climb down into my crypt of pain and exhume my weak body, skin pale as moonbeams, so I could affix myself onto their neck like a fledgling vampire.

And I did this. Often. I drank until I thought I’d drown and yet I was still thirsty. I broke people down until they were so weak I could see their veins through glass skin, until their smiles faded and they were no longer happy to see me. I never understood that I needed to love them back to keep them alive, to create a symbiosis between me and them. I just wanted to take and take.

I couldn’t understand why I didn’t feel love after I attempted to destroy them. So I just came to the conclusion they never loved me. I couldn’t see that I was nourishing myself on contempt disguised as love.

I used to think that love was something that had no boundaries, no responsibilities, no order. Love had no gods. No queens and kings. I declared that I was polyamorous. I could make my own family and forget the blood that tied me to a chain leading all the way back to the beginning of time. Really, I was terrified of anyone having the kind of power over me that love always demanded. Maybe it's not a consequence that polyamorous people tend to be into BDSM- even as you push away the idea that anyone else can impose rules on you, you crave to own and be owned, to become part of a superordinate hierarchy of belonging. It was a part of you that you couldn't deny, even as you tried to suppress it.

The idea of “anarchic love falls apart once you have a child, anyway. A child cannot be forgotten, swapped out, replaced, or disowned. Not if you love them.

At this point, I have to pause writing this letter because I’ve got a headache, and I can taste it pounding on my tongue. My whole body reverberates with shame, with a heady impulse to stop writing and throw this whole thing in the garbage.

You don’t write about your mistakes to serve as a warning, the slithering voice hisses. You do it because you love it.

I always repeat that Bukowski quote, “Find what you love and let it kill you,” but the truth is I don’t know how to die for love. All I knew was how to kill myself with my own stupidity.

Because that’s what I loved. I loved my stupidity.

I loved my ignorance because I thought it protected me. I loved how I could always make a mistake and retreat back into the warm complacency I didn’t know any better. I loved how no matter how much someone insinuated themselves into my life I had a safety net inside of me, of rage and blind disassociation. I didn't have to worry about being destroyed by romance. I'd built for myself a bed of needles. I carried it with me from room to room, and no matter how I slept, it bled me.

And the worst part is now that I see it, I can't even make my mistakes into a quirky little anecdote, some wry and witty observation about my faults, rolled up and packaged into elegant prose. Even in my darkest moments I'd think, at least I could get a good story out of this.

But there's no story here. There's no tragic beauty in falling in love with stupidity. What I thought I held inside me like a crown jewel was just a gnarled knot of fur and spit, its thorned edges beveled with poison. What I held so precious was the thing that wanted to destroy me. It fascinated me like the mesmerizing dimensions of a sorcerer’s spell. But the moment I blinked and turned away, the spell broke, and I could see that it was really nothing at all.

When I turned away from the comfort of my stupidity, I realized that love, true love, terrified me.

I always thought of Nietschze’s abyss as a chasm in the world, a void splitting the bottom of the Earth, like a metaphysical Marina Trench that glittered with the scintillating scales of monsters, embedded like crystal in their terrible forms. But there’s an abyss above us, too. It’s bright and eternal and beautiful, and if you stare at it too long, it’ll radiate through your entire body and transform you until you become unrecognizable to yourself.

People never tell you that moving toward the light of heaven can be just as frightening as the darkness. The forces around us that vy for our soul, our body, our attention, all want to use us for their own ends. They want to replace us, meld us into tools for their own end. Whether or not they’re good or bad. Whether they want to destroy us or lift us up toward salvation.

I still can’t tell you what love is. Its encompassing beauty blinds me. The responsibility it demands threatens to paralyze me. Its power of annihilation is equal to its splendor. It’s the reason why people say angels are terrible. It’s why a part of you knows that when you go toward the light you will leave behind something important. Something that protected you from the pain that true beauty brings.

All I can do is try to move a little bit closer to the real meaning of love every day. Even if it burns me with its radiance.

And it will. And it does.