Birthday letters (III)
turning 29
Today is my 29th birthday. Today also marks 1 year since Israel began its most recent genocide of the people of Gaza. Please consider donating to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, Middle East Children’s Alliance, or a charity of your choosing.
Two years ago, I shared 27 vignettes. Last year, I learned 28 lessons. Here are 29 things my friends have said to me about love this year.
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Two weeks ago, I texted some friends: what’s the best advice you’ve received about love? It’s a question that inevitably makes people feel put on the spot, I know. I was told as much even as I insisted, no pressure! No rush! I tried to rephrase to lessen its gravitas: or, something memorable said to you about love. I was met with bemusement. I couldn’t have sent a more Evana text. I did receive some immediate responses. Others didn’t know what to say. Some searched through their iPhone notes. Voice memos, block texts, in-person conversations, jokes. In the end, there was no shortage of material.
Just like this year. I’d spent the better part of it having conversations about love with many of the same friends I texted this question to. Long-winding theoretical discussions that led to more questions. Offhand quips that stopped me in my tracks. Concrete advice whether or not I asked for it. Love was always in the discourse this year, but then again, when is it not? Talking about love is one of the grand traditions of being alive: what it means to fall in and out of it, how to keep it, how to grieve it, how to live for ourselves and toward another.1
I spent the other part of my twenty-eighth year transcribing these conversations onto the page. Leaps of faith, searches for truth, sex, devotion, sacrifice—in these essays, in the second draft of my novel, in my own Notes app notes, what I wrote came back to love. Love, love, my subject. My singular obsession that I plan to write about for the rest of my life.
Writing is the act of attempting to describe the ineffable. Love, as the writer’s subject, then is a near perfect corollary. The experience of love is nearly impossible to capture in language. When someone manages to scratch even the surface of how it feels, it is nearly miraculous.
As I begin the end of my twenties, I have accepted that the only thing that matters is love. Because it’s all I care about, it’s all I write about. I keep bombing the Bechdel test. Ten years ago when I was a younger student and ten years from now when I won’t be much wiser. I just want love and all its accompanying pleasures. I want to make pomodoro sauce and have sex and hang out in the sun.2 I want to organize my days around love. I want love to saturate everything around me.
Before my last birthday, things were very different. I had come to the end of a situation where I had been strung along. I had grieved the relationship I’d spent most of my twenties in. I was dating again, confused as ever. I wanted to have fun. I didn’t feel like I needed a relationship, so I gathered crushes. Soon enough, I was down bad in a world historical way.3 There were so many types of connections to have, and I planned to try out as many as I could.
But to hunt for it too much would tarnish the eventual discovery. I have this visual of some people in this city who march for it. It truly doesn’t work like that. When it does finally arrive, it’s just a humbling magical experience.4
I had gotten good at focusing my efforts elsewhere, despite my preoccupation with romance. I spent the latter half of twenty-six and all of twenty-seven learning to be a friend again. “To be able to think, one must first have been a friend, a lover,” writes Byung Chul-Han. Twenty-seven was the year I accepted that I was as much of a genius as I suspected myself to be. I was paving a way into the future. I also had to be able to articulate what I wanted, to live the lesson that the arc of progress is moving closer to knowing what you deserve and not going back from there.5
My roommate had once said that falling in love in New York for the first time would be unlike anything else. Since moving to the city, I hadn’t actually fallen in love. There had been crushes, almost commitments, backsliding, but no, I hadn’t yet fallen head over heels for someone.
I still remember the moment you walked through the door one year ago. In love with you at first sight and thousandth sight.6 There have been times I’ve wondered if I thought you into existence. Once I misspoke, “It was before you were here,” when I meant, “It was before we knew each other.”
We took our time to dive to the bottom without realizing we were already in the deep end. Anne Carson writes, “When you’re falling in love, it’s always already too late.” For all my optimism and belief, I was defenestrated either way.7 The only love advice I’ve ever given has been: just go for it. Even in moments I was ready to give myself over to wild abandon, I doubted myself. I worried about the past, how I’d compare to others you loved—in good and bad ways. No one is a clean slate. You can’t meet someone in a perfect vacuum with no history or heartbreak.8 I worried about the future, how I would inevitably mess it all up. There were times I agonized that even the present wasn’t present enough. What if this had the potential to hurt worse than anything has ever hurt before? In six months or six years, the heartbreak would be the same. Why should that keep you from trying?9
On New Year's, we sat holding each other’s hands on the back patio in freezing darkness. We were buzzing with chemicals, natural and synthetic. I had to will myself not to tell you I was in love with you. My head on your shoulder, your voice etching its way through my skin. I feel like I’ve known you my entire life.10 Our whole life flashed before my eyes. I pictured us as children running through the woods around my childhood home. I pictured us as eighty-five with our grown children and their children. As I dreamed with you beside me, I swore you’d be able to read my mind.
You couldn’t, and still can’t read my mind, and neither can I read yours. It took me twenty-nine years to learn that when you want something, you have to ask for it. Love is a series of lessons. “For there is no other way,” writes Nietzsche. “Love, too, has to be learned.” I’ve become better for these lessons. You, always patient, have been there to scare away the scarcity I’ve imagined. It’s scary to be in love. That’s normal. When you’re in love with someone and they aren’t with you or vice versa, there’s no risk. You’re only letting go of an idea. Risk is only possible when you both are in love because there is something real you might lose.11 Because of you, I believe that we have plenty of time.12
You once told me it was impossible to lose you. The worst case scenario would be that we’d be writing emails to each other when we’re eighty. Seven months later, you tell me about an NPR piece about widowed partners, how much you’d miss me if I go first. I think of the last line of a Nicole Sealey poem I read to you one night: “O, how I’ll miss you when we’re dead.”
For many months, we had a fear of fighting. I didn’t want my past to jump out and scare you. What’s different with us is there’s no desire to win; we only want to understand each other. You will show the other person the most vulnerable parts of yourself which allows them to potentially use this information to hurt you, but you have to trust that they won’t do this. You will share these parts of yourselves with each other and build mutual trust over time.13 So I’ll accept this kind of loss—of ego, of the past—if it means that trust can blossom.
To win at love you have to lose.14 The alternative seems much more untenable to live the kind of life I want—to not have lost at all. Then how can we live with it? How does everyone carry that around with them every single day of their lives? It’s insurmountable. It should be totally consuming. And yet we all manage somehow.15 There’s no other choice but to savor that preciousness without the delusion of possession.
Last week I got a tattoo of a rabbit enclosed in a field of flowers. The image evokes the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters. The unicorn depicted throughout the panels there is a figure for Christ, a figure for the beloved, a metaphor for a thing so rare, those beholding it don’t know how to preserve its preciousness, so instead choose to destroy it. The rabbit revises the image of the unicorn. Where the unicorn is captive and calmly awaiting its slaughter from very real hunters beyond the frame of the tapestry, the rabbit isn’t in the same danger. The rabbit has agency. Small and quick, it has the power to choose its safest place. Its tranquility comes from the knowledge of its ability to outsmart danger.
The anxiety I experience is similar. Threats are mostly more imaginary than actualized. So much of what makes me anxious are past phantoms that have real bearing on what will happen in the future. You get to go to another place because you understand how you got here. You understand your history so you can move on and be in a healthy relationship without much echo from the past.16
What I worked for is safe now. I can call on the strength it took me to get here, how far I’ve come in twelve months. Before when I resisted stasis, my wild heart was always desiring freedom in the form of whatever was on the other side of the fence. The past when it was too easily conflate comfort with boredom.17 Now I don’t want to be anxious about my choice to stay in place. You have such a sweet moment for yourself. I hope you let yourself live it without tormenting yourself so much.18 I’ll find freedom in this enclosure of my own design.
Being in a relationship means surrendering a certain amount of freedom. Freedom is the opposite of love. When we turn twenty-five, we begin to relinquish some of our unboundedness. One of the big ways we do that is being in love. We become less concerned with our own freedom, and more invested in other people’s happiness.19 It’s self-making work to reconfigure your priorities, to embrace compromise, to be devoted. Being with another person means recognizing what you do will impact the other person—for better or for worse. Byung Chul-Han writes that self-negation is necessary. We must lose ourselves to find the other. And in this way, becoming less of an individual brings you closer to a more perfect love.
Let me rephrase that: I will love you not in spite of the imperfect, but because of it. To see you as a door, not a mirror. I’ll be late to work for a few more minutes in bed with you. I’ll say when it hurts. I understand it won’t make you leave me if we disagree from time to time.20 We have our first fight. Never go to bed angry.21 The afternoon nap that’s necessary because we stayed up, impossible to sleep when there is so much more to discover about this once stranger. Now I’ll never be the same. We’ll do the crossword until we can’t keep our eyes open. Head against head as we compile our favorite love songs. We don’t always like the other’s taste. We finish each other’s sentences. Every other word out of my mouth is your name.22
At the last minute, you ask me to go to the beach and I drop everything to join you. The prospect of deepening our closeness is too precious to pass up. That day you tell me you value our friendship. I will write this down. You’re honest with me under the shade of summer’s new leaves about the ways we disappoint each other. Disappointment in relationships is good. It’s an axis of proximity and distance.23 We survive. No one and everyone can save you.24 You mail me my things back, and I know you’re ok. On my couch, you make a case for why you need to break your own heart again. I’ll let you. I don’t understand you. I kiss you until your lips are sore. Leave a bruise on your neck in the shape of my mouth, even if it gets you in trouble. Anything to make you remember me. I’ll spend my life trying to get this right. I’m overly effusive, gesturing toward a future that’s not yet fathomable. The universe is better since you blipped into it.25 It goes both ways.
I’ll make a list of all the things you missed. I remember everything you say. Life got in the way, we haven’t talked much. I’ll almost cry when I hear your voice over the phone. Just remind me you’re important and what you’re doing is important too.26 This is the important work—our love is my life’s work.27
Hopelessly bored without you. Why should we have to go to our jobs when we could be hanging out all day?28 Sometimes we’ll have to be apart. There will be seasons of departures and returns. Under the almost always absent stars, you will tell me that I’m home to you. You were only sixteen blocks and ten years and several relationships and a few chance encounters away. Your hands in your pockets, hood up braced against the wind on the cold beach. The water and shore link. Infinite futures. Watching me turn and turn, heading towards you.
The morning after my birthday last year, I took the long way back to my neighborhood. The sun had started to rise. Couples of mourning doves huddled against the cool autumn air. I stayed awake for the entire first day of twenty-eight. It was almost time to live into the next year. Sleep was necessary before that could happen. Limbs heavy from dancing for hours, but I still wanted to walk. You biked home. I watched you go, imagining when I’d see you again. Our timing was a matter of delicate architecture. One of many possible beginnings. I didn’t know it then, but it wasn’t even the start. Maybe we have always belonged to each other without even knowing it.29
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Evana. This was biblical. What an honor to read. Thank you for sharing your genius, your tenderness, you strength with the world. We can all learn a lot from you.
beautiful & touching as ever :') happy birthday !