The List (The Real Thing collection)

by Jade Chang

the idea that stating your desires with a clarity of purpose and a pureness of heart (and then maybe, you know, taking a shower and going out into the world already) would make some perfect One appear just seems too easy to be true.

It wasn’t enough just to say I didn’t like the way the world was, I had to start saying, ‘Okay, what kind of world do I want?’”

We often view dating from a perspective of scarcity, it’s true.

“Magic is volatile; you will never get exactly what you think you’re going to get. Whatever it is will scare you,” says the Oracle. “But it will also delight you and exhilarate you. Magic is a wild animal. In a lot of ways, it doesn’t see the problems.”

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.

Even in the midst of great tragedy, we can be destroyed by love.

The economy of love doesn’t respond to hard work, to sheer will.

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.

“The List makes you face outward, which is never where the relationship is going to be. The process of looking for love is really a relationship with yourself.”

The more I delve into it, the more the List starts to feel like a diversionary tactic of late-stage capitalism, a hope bubble to keep us in thrall to a worn-out system.

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.

“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.”