And still

devotionals

Hi, here’s April’s first essay and a playlist I was listening to while writing. Hope you enjoy & thanks, as always, for being here.

+

This morning I wrote in my journal: I probably should cool it with the grand declarations.

What if I started this over? But how else am I supposed to show my devotion?

I’ve been trying to work through what devotion means because Christian and I, as we’re wont to do, got into a lively theoretical discussion the night before about the difference between worship and devotion. 

He says: Devotion is about a form of self-making labor—the self is constituted in part as a result of its work toward and for the other. Worship is self-erasing. A sublimation of the self into the other.

After we’ve exhausted our thoughts, Christian adds, This is just how I’ve made sense of it. I’m not reading any theory about it. But I will go to bat for my tiny ideas derived from long-form love agonizing.

That’s all we have, I say. At this point, I’m only interested in the empirical.

So I need more case studies. When I ask you what it means to be devoted to someone, you look at me and say, I’m devoted to you, which means that I hold you equally to myself.

We’re in your kitchen. My hands wade their way through the tap water and dishes. The elliptical motion of the sponge against the pan is methodical and slow. For me, the kitchen has always been a site of the devotional. The moments of beauty that have happened here have been quiet and small. Sacred sites are often mundane. Devotion is both the most mundane and miraculous thing in the world.

I silently catalog your acts of devotion. Building my closet. Gathering my favorite snacks the day my cat died. Bringing me coffee in bed to preempt the alarm that always jars me. Carrying my bike up the stoop. Reading my writing. Reading my favorite books. Praising me in front of others, whether I’m present or not. Holding me when I barely can keep my eyes open. Holding me in the way only you can. Holding me equally.

It takes a few days for me to put together that what the two of you are saying isn’t so different. I want to overcomplicate this but it’s actually pretty simple—worship is obliteration and devotion is something more like becoming. A practice toward and for.

So I’m trying to work out what it means to be working toward and for someone. To be working for you is when I put you first. Toward you is when I hold onto myself in order to hold onto you too. I can’t love you if I have obliterated myself for you in an act of worship. Because I would be gone. I believe this is the case in every relationship, romantic or otherwise. 

In therapy a few weeks ago, I tried to unearth why I’ve felt compelled to write. Is it pure, out of love, or is it out of a desire for recognition? Is it for other people? Sometimes, but it is mostly for myself. When people ask me how I make time to write, it’s as simple as if I didn’t, my head would explode. A different kind of obliteration. Writing is devotion because it can be self-definitional, and try as hard as I might, it’s never been self-erasing.

Later I tell you the essays people like best are the devotional ones—specifically devotional to you. You ask which I’m talking about. It quickly becomes clear there are a handful now. Then again, all my writing is devotional, at least in terms of this working definition.

One night in October—a night that inspired a devotional essay about you—we admitted that our greatest fear in a relationship was becoming someone’s entire world. It was early in our relationship when we weren’t calling it one. You told me you couldn’t be devoted to me. I found it strange because I had no idea what you meant. I also wasn’t asking for whatever that was. Or suppose I was and did implicitly understand it in theory, but not yet in practice. Over the following months, your devotion became palpable in actions first, then words. How it should always be. I did want you to want to give me things without me asking for them. 

I looked at you then, in my bed, and saw a world. I hoped you could recognize the one gazing back at you. It occurred to me, that if I wanted to lose myself in you, I could. You could be another powerful star that consumes the small planet that happens to enter its path. But you weren’t, and I was no small planet. And what we both knew is that I didn’t want that, and neither did you.

That night was the first act of devotion toward each other—to hold onto ourselves despite a past tendency to sublimate. Devotion is a practice of holding. Holding each other to the expectation that we will hold onto ourselves. Holding to a higher ideal as we articulate what it means to give each other things.

How have I shown my devotion? Grand declarations, effusive and always. Insane acts that only make sense when you call them love. Illegible to those who love conclusion because devotion, if anything, requires constant tinkering. Devotion is simply a process of making and revision. And because it goes both directions, it is collaborative. Somehow still effortless but maybe that’s only because the work is bigger than the both of you. So big it makes you forget it’s work at all. Because it’s never toil, it’s the only work I would want to dedicate myself to.

When we touch each other and it leaves me speechless, I tell you I’ll devote the rest of my life to trying to find the right words. That’s a promise as much to myself as it is to you. That I’ll continue to do my work alongside my work for and toward you. 

That night in the fall, I understood that I wasn’t going to lose myself in you even if I let myself be devoted to you. I wanted to take that leap. And I did. Through my devotion, I see myself more clearly because I am not you and the devotion can’t be satisfied. This is what a relationship should be: I will live my life for me and toward you. I will live my life for you and toward myself.

Breathless dir. Jean Luc Godard (1960)