Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life

Travelling up California’s coastline I finally acknowledged that these questions exist. That makes me hopeful, not because I need to answer the questions to move through my life, but because the questions I have keep me alert to life as I experience it.

Sontag wrote about the symbolism of moving from one place to another, from an old status to a new one. She encouraged the graduating students to think about the experience as ‘a model for how you should try to live. As if you were always graduating, ending, and, simultaneously, always beginning.’ That’s what transitions in status give us, the chanc

You never imagine you’ve used up all your life’s eyes-before-a-kiss moments. Very occasionally I feel a theatrical stab in my heart, I don’t want to live if they’re all gone.

‘What happens if it breaks?’ I asked Tessa. ‘We’ll deal with that if and when it happens,’ she said, ‘you just have to love it and wear it.’ I wanted to look at life like Tessa, to find its precarity beautiful.

Is it possible that life without romantic love isn’t so bad? Is it possible we can take as much pleasure in other loves, find new ways of incorporating romantic feeling into our lives, assign importance to crossing over thresholds that romantic love has abandoned? All those things could be true. But if they are, is it OK to still want romantic love

A fear I often return to is whether intimacy of the self counts. Does self-knowledge have to rebound from another, be in collaboration with someone, to give you the best look at yourself? Otherwise, might I only be hearing myself as echoes?

Intentional loss being a false equivalence. But it was my first experience of lamenting ‘what might have been’, and from that point onwards there was always a parallel existence in my mind, one where I had made a different decision.

It can sometimes feel like society isn’t keen on airing these thoughts of ambivalence. The way in which I can be a passionate advocate of access to free, safe, legal abortion as well as have complicated feelings about my own experience, sometimes wondering what if? In funnelling people into polarised positions, in resisting the difficulty of feelin

When I first read it, I thought only a lover could use the word ‘soul’ and get away with it. But it can’t be right that I need a lover so that I can speak of having a soul. That doesn’t do justice to the role platonic love plays in my life, its endless occasions for consideration of the soul. And it does not recognise the way art enables deep conne