love

Thu, on What Would You Tell Your Younger Self About Love? :

I would tell myself to not believe the dramatic stories I've been told and sold (which were mostly white, cishet stories that never quite applied to me). I would tell myself to look closer to home, to see the smaller, constant stories of love. I spent yesterday building my father's altar... See more

I love tomatoes a little more than I used to because of a poem my best friend wrote. I paint landscapes because that’s what my grandpa on my dad’s side used to paint before arthritis froze his fingers. I love the color blue a little more than I used to because it’s my other best friend’s middle name. I love the spring because my grandpa on my mom’s... See more

If you loved someone, even for a little, it’s because you knew them. And if someone loved you, even for a little, it’s because they knew you. The knowledge of that remains eternal.

Love demands a complete inner transformation — for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother. We have to become, in some sense, the person we love. And this involves a kind of death of our own being, our own self.

Honey, I really don’t care what you have to do in order to return to a feeling of love. In your scariest moments, you have my permission to find me however you need to find me. And if “finding love” means scarfing down a box of cereal on a scary night alone in a hotel room in a foreign country, then you better believe that I was inside that box of

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It means even more now, as we have lived enough to have accumulated some regrets, abandoned dreams, things we ruminate on late at night. We know the edges to our abilities, the ways we have fallen short of our own expectations. We are learning something new: loving people, flawed and limited as they are, instead of expecting perfection.