The List (The Real Thing collection)

by Jade Chang

People tend to cling to anything that claims to mediate between desire and chaos, especially if it has just a few easy-to-follow rules.

The economy of love doesn’t respond to hard work, to sheer will. No, the sort of relationship that we’re discussing requires, at minimum, two participants, which means that it is always reliant on the ultimately unknowable thoughts and feelings of another person. Sure, you can probably seduce someone into falling in love with you, but that leads to a lifetime of never being loved for your true self.

Actually, the most valuable effect of list making might be the realization that you are allowed to ask for something, that you are not a mere supplicant at the feast of love.

That’s what the List seems to do—it makes you believe, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

but I am a skeptic who will believe in anything once. Of course I did it; I made the List.

If I were to make a List now, though, it would have only one line: someone who truly enjoys being a person in the world.

And yet, while I really do believe that everything is love, that we’re all forever beholden and beloved, that a total oneness with a true love and moment of pure connection with a stranger touch on the same infinite space, at the same time I also know that we are born alone and we die alone, that anything else is just a temporary waystation, that permanence is illusory.

But then I also feel like fuck all that philosophical noise, all I want is someone to hold my hand.

Here’s what I really think about love: It’s all luck, in the purest and most abstract sense.

Love might feel like an achievement, but it is rarely dependent on merit.

“Rather than judging love by its duration, we should give up judging love at all. Love is the life force flowing through us. Love is the moment when the walls that separate us from the rest of the universe come tumbling down. And we stand there, naked and afraid, but not alone. Even a glimpse of that not-aloneness is worth it. Because it’s proof that we are part of something larger and more important than ourselves.”