Only truth

constructions

Hi, here’s an essay on love and a playlist to go with it. xoxo.

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Late November saw me walking up and down the avenue that would eventually connect our apartments. On many mornings, pushing the limit of what would be an acceptable start time for work, I’d be in my day-old clothes clutching my phone, checking to make sure no one noticed my tardiness (they didn’t). I pushed time because I thought it was a matter of time before I’d make a confession that would bookend us. I thought what we had was far more precarious than it was. The early days of seeing someone convince you of many things. That you’re a breath away from fucking things up at all times. But also that the consequences of bending some rules are worth it for a few more minutes in that person’s arms. 

On these walks home, I would think about the past summer. For months, I’d been circling you without knowing it. I ran down the avenues of our shared neighborhood in the early evening, chasing the waning light like my photographer friend had invited me to do on so many aimless weekends. I would run harder than I usually did to exhaust myself. Sprinting to the same song over and over.

I was on a mission, on these runs. To accomplish what I didn’t know. I remember feeling compelled to take that same run almost every day. Why I felt that compelled was an equal mystery to why I couldn’t get over the person I was trying to get over.

The runs were cathartic because I was in what I thought could have been love with a person who didn’t love me. The unrequited crush that went on for far too long. This, by my eventual definition, wasn’t love, of course. As my mind raced, I had started to articulate the particular truth that it couldn’t be love without some reciprocation. It couldn’t be love if someone was constantly dishonest. 

When it’s not love but you want it to be, you’re in a constant act of deception. You tell yourself if you wait a little longer, if you try a little harder, if you deny yourself and be consumed by flames as Rilke says, it could turn into love. Eventually, I got a definitive end with the person I thought I was in love with. My heart ached with echoes of what ifs. I continued my runs on that same route. Slower now. Searching different streets as if they contained the answers until my chest felt empty. Until the white rabbit with a ticking clock that lived in my brain announced I was out of time. Summer was over. I was empty-handed. On those runs, I thought I was running towards nothing, as I had been running towards nothing for months. 

One of those fall mornings before I walked home, we’d been talking about Simon and Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence. So of course, on my way home, I listened to the album. An attempt to decode a message I hoped was there. I wanted to know you through the things that moved you because you moved me. I wanted to be something that moved you. I played “Kathy’s Song” as I prepared to turn onto my old street. From the corner of my eye, I saw in a basement window the vinyl version of the album propped on the sill. I couldn’t believe it. A sign.

I sent you a message immediately to tell you about the coincidence. Anything to remind you of me when everything reminded me of you. 

Later that day, I’d take a run through your neck of the neighborhood. The hours between morning and late afternoon seemed to compress into one long season where finally I was running toward something. I felt compelled again to follow the route, but this time without the same anxiety that pulsed through me that summer. An anxiety of loss then. Now I was oddly calm for how much latent ecstasy dwelled in my body. This time I knew why I was doing what I was doing. Why I seemed to be pulled in a direction that would end on your street. I was falling in love with you. 

We spent months hedging our bets. Who folds first was not a matter of strategy, but timing. I rehearsed the conversation in my head: what happens when I fall in love with you? I thought it was off-limits. I could imagine many versions of this speech, but I couldn’t imagine your answer. Because I wasn’t ready to give you that speech, I also wasn’t prepared to imagine the answer I didn’t want. 

Almost a month later, we spent a string of beautiful days together that left me lovesick. We parted then I met up with friends at a coffee shop. I put my face into my hands in pantomimed agony. My two friends looked at me with little sympathy. You idiot, just enjoy it. I could read their minds. Finally one of them told me I couldn’t out-genius love. For weeks, I’d been joking that I was going to solve romance. If you try to do that, my friend said, if you try to anticipate every possible feeling, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Why? Because you’ll miss the best part. 

I know I’m not the only person who wants to out-genius love. Out-geniusing it would give you a semblance of control that love otherwise takes from you. To be able to define love is another attempt at control, however benign. If I could just understand it, I wouldn’t be driven so insane by it, right? But don’t pretend. You like to be driven insane. In the last few weeks, I’ve found myself discussing with friends how you know you’re in love. What are the tell-tale signs? Is it always the same?

Unconditional care.

Being seen and understood, completely.

The inability to think about anything other than that one person. A feeling that they are with you even when they’re physically not. Waking in the morning and being surprised they’re not there. 

A survey I took for a matchmaking party around Valentine’s listed the feeling of jumping into the ocean, being struck by lightning, resting your head against a living, breathing, full-sized horse, sleeping on a regular mattress after sleeping on a plane, holding sweaty hands. Even the ones that were joking still had a truth to them.

My own non-exhaustive list: Standing with the freezer open in the middle of summer to get some relief. Warmth rushing back to the body after a long walk in the snow. Waking at two a.m. and going to the kitchen to drink a glass of water. The first yellow leaf you find on the sidewalk when the trees are reluctant to put on their autumn coats. Wandering into the park at twilight and falling asleep in the grass. A never-ending honeymoon period where you realize the honeymoon is the relationship itself.

Most of these definitions are shrouded in metaphor. Language fails to capture feeling once again to no one’s surprise. As much as we try to describe, we’re reduced to simile. Our definitions fall apart like paper in water. 

Love, if it can be distilled to one definition, is a quest for truth. So says French philosopher Alain Badiou. I’ve been reading his work In Praise of Love and underlining so many passages to the point of illegibility.

Badiou argues that the importance of love does not rest in the moment of meeting, but instead, the endurance of it, the quest to make and remake meaning together despite a thousand reasons to be broken apart. Badiou is interested in duration and process, not starting points. Love is an extension of the chance encounter into the construction of something that endures. That construction in turn, becomes a way of searching for truth. It could take a lifetime.

Then love is also a question of time. Not one with expiration in Badiou’s view, but one without limit. Time is required to build something real and lasting, for however long. Badiou does flirt with the idea of eternity, but only in the sense that love does last for eternity regardless of whether two people stay together. Because once you have been moved by love, you’ll never be the same, even if it happens multiple times.

(You’ve said before that we have all the time in the world. I remember the first time you said it. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard anything that romantic.)

Love fucks with time, in less elegant terms. Everyone knows this. It confuses a month for years, a day for lightyears, a second for eternity. I’m confused constantly. Or maybe it’s just disbelief, something I say to you often, I can’t believe we’re together. Actually, it’s not so much disbelief about the time that has passed, but that there was a time I didn’t know you. You were there. A steady stream of encounters that at the time seemed insignificant, and now read as something like inevitable. Counting down to when we would mean something different to each other.

Recently, you asked me what day I realized I was in love with you. Another attempt to examine the beginning. It was difficult to pinpoint a day because there were so many moments when I hit the gravel—like my head did once when I was a child and leaned back on the swings and then let go—that I knew by the sheer force of feeling that it was true. I loved you. There could be no other answer. The truth is that I knew I loved you long before it would be acceptable to admit it. And now we can admit this to each other. I’m not sure if there is a greater freedom.

Tonight I’m alone. I spent the night writing this because I failed to write three different versions of this essay. Earlier, I read Badiou’s In Praise of Love on the train. After I finished the book, I noticed pairs commuting together. It’s a favorite game of mine to wonder how many people in a given space are in love. Shortly before I disembarked, I watched one couple kiss each other goodbye. I watched them for probably too long. I like to think about the smallest possible thing that could make me happy. It’s this: bearing witness to two worlds that have come together. Not as one, but as two choosing to coexist instead of merge entirely. One member of the couple caught me gazing at them, so I looked over his shoulder to give their worlds some privacy.

I told a friend over lunch how we all think our love stories are singular, but so many of them bear similarities. This is a good thing. The universal love story appeals because we all want our own so badly. While many relationships follow similar patterns, I still maintain no two relationships are the same. My friend and I walked in the rain as we talked about making some mistakes again and again. There are patterns in nature that repeat, and we find them to be beautiful. Why can’t we find our own patterns to be as compelling?

Time and again, I understand my task is to hold two conflicting things as true. That is what love asks of us anyway—to bear witness to an entirely different perspective with adoration and show the other person ours. The truth remains elusive. So we’ll keep searching for it. I’m looking closely at what was a matter of chance—our meeting—and beholding something else. Something that has lasted and surprises me every time the thought returns: The only truth I know is you.

A woman is a woman, dir. Jean Luc Godard (1961)