None of This Is Bad

Today we spoke on the phone. And before I knew it, ninety minutes had passed. When it is you and I, it is always this way. My heart felt lighter and kinder and I felt braver afterward. You are and always will be one of the waves I have enjoyed most in this life.

I met up with a neighbor who is ta newer adult-friend (we've only known one another three years), but who feels like someone I have known decades. Her kids and our kids are similar enough that we are allowed some peace. And when it is she and I, I can be off-color and ugly and perfectly myself and it feels entirely normal to be precisely who I am.

I walked, of course, and the snow was still perfect and white and reflected the light of the sun. The storm had ceased, but the world was all sparkle. Days like today transport me, just a bit, somewhere entirely different. It is a reminder that the place we live is already overflowing with magic, despite the infinite ways we normalize wonder.

I spent the afternoon prepping vegetables and perfecting a sauce and making some kind of lasagna concoction that was delicious. My kids picked at it and were not brave enough to say they hated it. I ate it until my stomach hurt. It is a luxury to have time to linger over a dish and to experiment with ingredients and to create a meal because it is joyful and grounding and lovely to demonstrate one's love in this way.

And I lingered today on all of the people I have loved in my life and all the different kinds of love I've known. I have known the kind of closeness and kinship that comes from years and years of proximity, devotion, and loyalty. I've fallen out with childhood friends, only to establish a connection again in adulthood. I've known friends who were lovers who disappeared from my life entirely and others who went back to being friends again. And I have loved in an incapacitating way my brothers and my parents and my dearest aunts and uncles and cousins. I have, I think, even loved those who are no longer here despite never making their acquaintance. It is the drum beat of their lives that echoes, even now, in every step I take and choice I make.

I thought today about the way that love changes over decades and, particularly, when that love is tied to one person. We are so obsessed with love at its inception. The stage where lust is at its peak and what the viewers really want to see is some absurdly physical supernova joining of two more-than-average attractive people. There are not a great many love stories about the kind of love that lasts or what that requires of a person because, frankly, it is a drab and dull prospect to dissect. What I do know is that it requires devotion, dedication, and patience. And I also know it requires a recognition that love is not stagnant and that it comes with phases of perfection and peace and phases of deterioration and boredom and then a subsequent rebuilding.

And I know that the phases that allow it to last are not possible for everyone. Perhaps because the two people involved don't both want to change or, sometimes, because they happen to walk oppositional paths. Or, more painfully, because a betrayal has been too great and true healing and communion can never exist again. And, sometimes, I think things end because humans are endlessly complex and it is impossible to predict who or where or how any one person will be a day from today, let alone decades into the future.

It seems to me that a true love-match requires an enormous degree of resilience and commitment and two people who are exceptionally malleable and open to being molded by the inevitable erosion of time. Add to that equation an enormous amount of kindness, empathy, and compassion. But above all else, add a distasteful and shocking amount of luck to that equation.

I think we think of love as fixed, somehow. When in actuality, it would be good to think of it as an ever-changing amalgam of forces. And I think it is time we stop blaming ourselves and others when the fairy-tale story of the supernova of attractive-looking people isn't quite the narrative we end up with forever. People are endlessly complicated and complex and messy. And because love involves two such individuals encountering and battling their own set of challenges and difficulties, it is inevitable that reality would differ more than just a bit with the supernova hollywood has sold.

You are allowed to be messy. You are imperfect. I am, too. But I love you, anyway. All of you. And besides, this right here is just a different way for the water to be for a little while. And truly, none of this is bad (for reference, you really MUST watch the Chidi clip I keep directing everyone and their mother to watch; Chidi's Wave Returns to the Ocean).