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This is not a story about work or precarity. I am trying, late in the evening, to say something about love, which for many of us is not separable from the other shit.
We all have our truth of a place. There is no universal narrative of any city that is also real. Only marketing.
Life by now had settled into habit.
Desire does not feature prominently.
While two people are still alive to try, he said, it’s never too late, and it’s never the end.
A painful swell of tenderness and regard and gratitude.
Most often when I considered my childhood, a miasma of confused sensation and blurred events rose in me.
It is terrible to know that with a few fumbling words you might either wound or exalt somebody you love.
How was anyone expected to dream loftily about the future when the present ground them down to powder and nothingness?
good love can rescue a person. Pull them out of the waves. Bad love is a rip current. It can drown you.
love exists to market expensive fitness classes to straight people.
Sometimes people just are that way, in perpetual recovery.
Felt like a fish out of water, whacked on its head.
The house was different when emptier. Quiet, roomy, peaceful like a hug.
We create our lives saying one small yes to one small thing at a time. We create the world that way.
What nobody told me when I was a very young person was that obedience, fearful toeing of every line, chasing every kind of safety, would not save you. What nobody told me growing up was that sometimes your friends do join your family, fusing care, irritation, loyalty, shared history, and affectionate contempt into a tempered love, bright and daily as steel.
The world we knew has always been half-terrible, made as it is by the powerful, for the powerful. We were crowning a different one. Its birth would not be easy; no birth was.
