I woke up at 5:48 this morning, and then was unable to go back to sleep.
For one, because the upstairs had started hammering at something. At first decisive and loud, shifting to an almost apologetic hesitancy when I imagine the thing refused to be politely hammered into place with a quickness as they expected, then briefly back to “omg just be hammered and done” loudness before a flurry of fainter clunk-clink-clink-clunks.
For two, and perhaps more this than the former, I’d suddenly lit upon what exactly I am looking for in partnership. Romantic or otherwise.
It’s really too bad “I am thirty-seven, going on thirty-eight” doesn’t fit as well into that well-known song. It’s that extra syllable with the seven, y’see. “I am thirty-six, going on thirty-seven” can almost just be forced into the melody without too much strain.
Anyway.
I have said repeatedly how I wished someone had told me decades earlier how skinfolk ain’t kinfolk and how that extended to other sorts of “like”.
It’s a complicated matter when you’re an immigrant, I think. Or perhaps it’s the brand of immigrant my parents’ generation happened to be.
The sort of immigrant who believed they had to be the absolute best they could be, at everything, because they were “the face of their country”. All of us, unpaid and exploited ambassadors set adrift in a hostile land.
The sort who clung to their “like” because, again, of that hostility. Where you had to believe there was a safe harbor in that “like” because to believe otherwise was possibly the start of a descent into abject despair.
When you’ve had it drummed into your brain since ever that your safety was in “like and alike”; when you would like to say kindness over all but you’ve been fooled too many times by insincere niceness covering up a deep well of bigotry…
I don’t know; perhaps I am trying to give myself an excuse for why it took me so long to distill everything down to the simplest “I would like to be with someone who enjoys me and my company and who would like to experience life alongside me”.
Someone who is happy to have fun, to go out and see the world, but who is also happy to delve into the fullness of life within the home and silence.
It’s just, more questions, y’know?
Do you really value intelligence that much, or is it that you associate more intelligence with either less bigotry or a better facade for their prejudices? Or perhaps just someone who is better at gaslighting you?
Do you really need to be with someone who shares all your interests, or is it because you need that shared topic of conversation or else you have nothing to talk about?
Do you really enjoy that person’s cutting wit and scathing quips, or is it because all that was directed at a shared enemy and you thought that would forever be the case?
Do you really disdain the “basic mundaneness” of a gentle and considerate person, or are you just traumatized by all the time you thought someone liked you but actually didn’t? Possibly loathed you in truth, but you didn’t guess at an inkling until far too late?
gestures vaguely at the internets
It’s 2023 and everyone can be at everyone else’s throats at the slightest hint of them “not doing x right”.
Whether x is queerness or it’s disability or it’s how we envision the revolution or how we do our part for the environment (stop buying into capitalism blaming us for global warming when military expenditures drive a hella lot more than your sometimes use of a plastic bag btw) or or or.
But we’ve been divided and conquered and continue to press that colonization upon each other because for some reason it is too hard to hate Bezos or Musk or all the celebrity CEOs we wish we were.
I don’t have answers here, sorry.
Near thirty-eight years in and I still don’t know how to tell if someone really likes me or when they only like the idea of me that is convenient to what they want.
But it’s nice to have all the floating bits of notions coalesce, regardless.
I like strolling around Ikea, just as I love ducking into groceries when I go traveling, just as I am always a soft touch for a cute oversized mug, just as I adored going to a different farmer’s market every day of the week when I lived in Boston, just as I was happy to drive hours up to Ogunquit Beach every weekend of the summer as long as water temperatures were barely tolerable, just as…
All those things, scattered like stars across the night sky, and you think them just stars.
Until someone sees a constellation in you, and names you their love, and decides that their night sky isn’t complete without your stars in it.
They say, find someone who knows how to go through life to go through life with, and yes.
A ten thousand times yes.
Because how can you claim to know, when you’re unable to see the world that is born in a soap bubble, brilliant and precious for those brief seconds before it is no more?