Howdy.

Do you ever have strange, beautiful epiphanies on your daily commute? The kind that make you freeze for a moment while the rest of the world keeps shuffling and honking and running all around you?

Here’s one of mine. This one is for anyone who saw me crazily writing in my journal at the red traffic light today.

I was driving home when I had this thought. Or feeling. Or whatever you call it when you’re at a red light and have to whip out your journal and scribble some words in it. Today those words were about love. Love and how it lingers.

Let me back up.

BUMPING INTO MY OWN LIFE

One of you commented that I seem to always be “bumping into my own life”. I thought that that was a perfect way to describe what it feels like to be living in the corner of the world that I have spent my whole existence in. It’s true that I cannot go anywhere without bumping into a story, a memory, a ghost. My world right now is something like a graveyard in that way. I can’t always see the bodies, but I can feel their lingering spirits. The spirits of people I have known, yes, but also of times and places and moments. And more than anything, of me and who I have been. I see my five year old self dancing on the pink sidewalks of my parent’s street and my sixteen year old self sitting on the sand in Ocean Beach with her best friend, eating a burrito and talking about things that felt so important. On that same sand, just a few yards down, a few years down, I see myself at twenty, standing in the embrace of a boy who gave me his everything because he didn’t know any better.

I walk through these moments without meaning to. I’m just walking down the street, coming around a corner, and then there it all is. My whole life playing out before my eyes, one scene falling right into the next. And so, “bumping into” feels appropriate. It suggests that not only are these memories things I don’t intentionally excavate, but also that they are so abundant, and so close at all times, that nearly every move that I make is bound to graze upon the elbow of one, the hand of another. When I think about moving to Brooklyn next year, I think about how healthy and fresh it will be to finally have some room. To finally let go of all of these invisible hands and reach out for something new.

LOVE CANNOT BE CREATED OR DESTROYED

But this is about love and how it ties into this and why it made me tear open my journal at that red light today. Those hands, yes, can be cold and chilling when they touch you. Like a draft that kisses your bones with ice and takes your mind three thousand miles into yesteryear. I know those hands. But they are not the only kind. There are also hands that feel like the sun itself when they find you. Like today. I was driving past the street I took so many times to meet an old boyfriend of mine. For coffee, for a walk, for fresh oranges from his tree that he gave me overflowing bags of in the same way that he did with his love. And as I thought of these things, I felt such warmth that it were as if it were holding me up, three feet off of the ground. And I realized then that this was his love holding me up, that I still have it.

At first, this felt selfish. My love for him was not a bag full of home grown oranges. It was tricky and fleeting and then it was gone. And so was I. Yet even after breaking his heart, I still have all of this love that he gave me. My first instinct was to call him up and tell him that he forgot it, that he could swing by and pick it up tomorrow. It didn’t feel like mine to keep. It felt unfair. But it’s not, is it? Because I too have given out more love than I would ever get back. I too have had my heart broken, stolen, and sucked dry. That’s how it works. We give and take. Give and take. At the end of the day, all we can really hope for is a kind of balance to it all.

So I don’t feel bad anymore. Because the love that I have given people is forever theirs to keep. I loved them for a reason. You have to assume that this is also true for those who have loved you.

I was looking through old journals the other day when I found an entry from a few years ago that read Love is an energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only repurposed, converted, from one form to another. I was seventeen. I think my inspiration was chemistry class. But I love it. It rings like the anthem of my life. It means that all the love that you have ever given is still out there and that it will come back to you. It means that whatever love you have lost, is not really lost. There have been times in my life where I have given all of this light to people who gave me nothing in return. And while I never got that light back from them, I did always get it back in other ways. I would be walking down a golden-lit street or watching the planes land when suddenly all of that light would slam right back into my chest. It seemed to come out of thin air. It wasn’t romantic love or familiar love or love in any state that I had given it out in, but it was love. Just in another form.

all of mine, -m.

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