In the same world

valentines

Happy Valentine’s Month. You may have noticed that paid subscriptions have been paused. This is so I can focus on other work & projects. Free essays will still be published on a semi-regular schedule. I’m so happy you continue to be here. xoxo.

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Historically speaking, I’ve always had a crush.¹ One could point to the Valentine’s Day card exchanges in elementary school as the origin of my romantic mythology. The exchanges were always monumental occasions because even as a child, I knew the power of a love letter and I knew how to scheme. I’d get the store-bought variety pack of cards like all my other classmates—one year Spider-Man, the next Scooby Doo, another year Kim Possible. Then, I would carefully select the most special design for my crush. No one else in my class would get that card. The stock design—in my mind—was a subliminal message. It declared my affection through character-appropriate puns. I’m caught in your web, Valentine. I believed my crush would see the special message and our romance would begin from there. Despite my scheming, that message didn’t ever go through. And worse, the card I received from them showed no evidence that they were thinking of me too. I would be devastated. Then I’d go home after school, wander around the woods on my parents’ property and write poems about my unrequited crush in a red-fur-covered notebook, tears unending. A little Sappho in the woods. I put candy hearts in my mouth and wished and wished and wished. 

I got older and didn’t stop wishing, but my empirical nature longed for experience to make proofs of my daydreams. Childhood crushes soon gave way to teenaged lovesickness then to young adult romance. I explored every method I could to understand why I was in a constant state of longing. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking all desire is yearning.² Several relationships and many almost ones, attempts at matchmaking for my friends, reading books and watching stories unfold onscreen that paralleled my own. All of these validated my theories, but what I really discovered was the wretchedness of [my] empirical life and of [my] unsuccessful attempts.³ In other words, I was still hopeless.

So I learned to love the questions because I learned having questions was actually better than having answers. Eros is part of thinking and eros became my worldview.⁴ What I really mean is there’s nothing better than having a crush. Days suddenly carry more significance, especially the ones when the tide shifts even slightly. The simplest words become charged with an intensity that is almost intolerable.⁵ Some days are so beautiful you worry talking about them will make other people jealous. At home over the holidays this year, I felt like a teenager again because I was longing for my crush in the exact same way I did when I was sixteen, twenty, twenty-six. It happens this way every year. The longing doesn’t change, but the crush often does.

Then February comes around. Like clockwork, I experience romantic visions of excess. I’m preoccupied with having a valentine.

A valentine is a kind of motion and all motion is toward something.⁶ A montage of moving images. Always one daydream away. An ill-advised run in their part of town. Late-night pasta because all night you were staring at them and forgot to eat. Activities that become sacred rituals. Cake smeared on cheeks then kissed off. A song you’re sure is about them. Every song, actually. A bed with all the sheets kicked to the floor. The very threshold of a swoon.⁷ A bike ride through extreme wind that almost blows you over. You can imagine being left flat on your back in the middle of the road. But you pedal through until you catch the right current to drift. And that’s what it continues to feel like: alternately drifting and accelerating.

Slow down so that your heart and body can keep up. I was recently given this advice. Was it advice about writing or was it about romance? Or everything? Since I was a child, my parents told me to slow down, but I would race ahead at every chance I got. Not much has changed. I’m so impatient. I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time.⁸ Recently I said I wanted to try to be like an animal for whom only the present moment exists. I don’t ever succeed.

My desires may run me ragged, but I’m not the saint locked away in a cell awaiting his execution and scribbling letters. I’m not the martyr sparing lovers for all of history at the expense of himself, the arrow of desire bent in his chest. It would be fatal to pull it out and stupid to. Everyone has to see it—the purpose of martyrdom is to become an example. Instead, I’m human, I’m but flesh and blood. Hence it is capable of endless desire, endless gratification, and endless pain. These, however, are imprisoned in the heart of a mortal; no wonder, therefore, if it seems like to burst, and can find no expression for the announcements of endless joy or endless pain.⁹ What happens then when you push through the endless pain? What exists on the other side of endless gratification? Is it more intensity?

I was told the thing about intensity is that it can cloud judgment. Intensity may make it difficult to see a valentine for who they really are. But I disagree. Intensity is clarifying. Slowly, the other person comes into focus. At first, it’s difficult to make them out, but eventually every feature is visible. Wishing someone could film the way I’m looking at you right now.¹⁰ Every small divot in their formerly rough surface is a revelation. It’s a shock if you’re able to crack them open, ever so slightly. (Or maybe, if the sex is good enough, it’s you who’s been cracked open.) You discover this person isn’t a rock, but a geode. All the bright jagged plane faces within that render you speechless. That you could be touching something so beautiful. Something that was once hiding in plain sight.

A valentine surprises you because suddenly all your theories have been rendered pretty useless. What is stupid is to be surprised, the lover is constantly so […] perhaps he knows his stupidity, but he does not censure it.¹¹ You missed the clues, you’re baffled yet again. But the mystery is as crucial as it is complex. To honor another’s complexity is to honor your own. That complexity holds an entire history of truths. How can what is pure chance at the outset become the fulcrum for a construction of truth?¹²

Late this summer, I collected several texts, songs, fragments and emailed them to a former crush with the subject line “tiny museum” (“of my affection” was implied but not included). The one passage I debated on taking out was this: all honorable relationships are a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.¹³ When I composed the email, I thought our relationship had helped me understand what it meant to refine certain truths. I was wrong. I couldn’t tell him the truth, probably never could. He never responded, never acknowledged receipt.

A friend once told me relationships are a product of how they were built. I’m older now, by only a year, but I’m working hard to build with honesty. In the dark of my room, I confess and confess.

Here’s a recent one: sometimes I’ve wondered whether we could have found each other before now. But I know we needed a different timeline. I like to think it’s the one we got. I would like to think I needed to be this person first—mostly fully formed but not quite completely, I’m still working on that—before we met. My heart needed to harden from others’ carelessness and soften from my own cautious optimism along the way. I needed the truth to be elusive before I could find myself in your arms. That string needed to elongate until it went slack when we looked up and saw each other there. All that time so we could calibrate the right measure of closeness and distance, one we still work to get right. The highest task of a bond between two people that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.¹⁴ Though we will likely fail at this, I don’t mind. To yearn for something is to value it.¹⁵

Desire is ultimately a failure of satisfaction. The problem for us is not that our desires are satisfied or not. The problem is how we know what we desire.¹⁶ I know I desire failure because failure welcomes repetition. Thank god for that. I want to keep trying. Each attempt is different, with vastly different results. I’m better for all the times I’ve fucked it up as much as the times things have gone right, for however long. But there’s no prediction or measurement. Things work out or they don’t.¹⁷ I can’t pass my valentine a note during class asking them to check yes or no. A box for maybe doesn’t exist. Our fear of losing always corresponds to our desire to have.¹⁸ Lose, after all, means a failure to win. And everyone knows the lover is the loser.¹⁹ These dichotomies invite us to keep trying to have, knowing we can’t hold too tightly. Let me fail again and again. 

A walk around the neighborhood with a friend ends with us concluding we may never figure it out. Yes, we’re doomed romantics (in the same way all relationships are damned from the perspective of eternity. What I mean with this clumsy term is, maybe they will last²⁰). At least we can gush to each other about our individual romances and laugh at our own theatrics. We save ourselves this way. It’s possible we’ll finally solve it when we’re so old it won’t matter anymore. Not that I really believe it ever won’t matter. Because when I long for you, I start to understand something perfect.

So it does or doesn’t begin here:

A morning when so much sun floods my room, I can barely see my own hands. My vision returns only when I roll onto my side. You’re there next to me, like all the times I wished you were. I look at you and would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world.²¹ Too early to fully be awake, we slip in between the sheets, between sleep, between words and softer sounds, between now and later when I replay this scene. I once called a moment like this holy. Holiness implies some untouchability, something impossible to behold. The valentine can be held. I just can’t believe it’s me who gets to hold you.

Fallen Angels, dir. Wong Kar-wai (1995)

1. Italicized sentences in this essay are either direct quotes or ideas in summary from the authors included in these footnotes.

2. Maggie Nelson

3. Merleau-Ponty of Cézanne

4. Byung-Chul Han

5. Alain Baidou

6. St. Augustine

7. Georges Bataille

8. Roland Barthes

9. Arthur Schopenhaur

10. The Japanese House

11. Roland Barthes

12. Alain Baidou

13. Adrienne Rich

14. Rainer Maria Rilke

15. Barry Stevens

16. Slavoj Žižek

17. Helena Fitzgerald

18. Hannah Arendt

19. Anne Carson

20. Slavoj Žižek

21. Frank O’Hara