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This Is Us
Tripping Over the Weaknesses of Men I Have Loved
Embarking on the project of loving ourselves regardless of how people love us, or fail to
We cannot be introspective without cause. The compulsion to sit down and willingly examine who we are and how we have come to be doesn’t arrive like the wind on our faces in the evenings. Things have to happen. Feelings of loss and helplessness have to interrupt the daily motion of things; we have to discover ourselves lost, standing in the middle of the poor form of rubble that signals the end of an experience, a relationship, a time in our lives; we have to find sorrow on the cusp of something so good; we have to feel darkness descend and refuse to lift; we have to barter our realities for a promise that we’ll try; we have to lose, and lose, and lose again.
What am I doing as I write this? I’m sitting cross-legged at the dining table on my patio (the tablecloth is batik), I’m watching an old lady with curly white hair and a pink floral top peer into my home, I’m listening to The 1975 play a snippet of “Depth” at the Reading Festival in 2019 (pronounced ‘read’ as in the past tense of ‘read’), I’m having a casual chat with someone about not being loved the way I want. Details matter. They are the elements that string our lives into a…
