A belated valentine
Last year, on Valentine’s Day, I sent you the following:
I am always relieved when I have been patient without effort. When time has passed and I have not worried about what I will find on the other side of it. When I can trust the air, the swaths of space I have to myself. I am grateful to receive a letter without having waited for it. To forget a plan with a friend before arriving in time. I’m happy to notice without agenda. To be curious with a sense of mischief.
It all takes an extraordinary life disguised in the mundane. And as present as you are, and as inherent as the earth is, you can’t make one alone. At unspecific and unexpected points, you will need extraordinary people.
I still believe this. But I also know that in my life, I have depended on the fantasy of the Other. In this spirit of invention, I have sometimes ignored the present moment, which is much more fascinating. I have mistaken fantasy for love. I imagined that by loving me, someone would absolve me of everything pathetic and tragic and obscure about me, as if I were Jane Eyre. Yes, I imagined being a kind of woman. I was so curious about her, about what she did and how she thought and what the Other liked about her. I mimicked her behavior. It always felt funny, ridiculous, but I knew that this was the problem of my alien self. I had moved too much growing up, my parents were from places that other people didn’t expect. I had to find a fixed place on Earth. Something that wouldn’t budge.
This weekend, I wrote in my journal “I’m currently very happy with my life. On Valentine’s Day, I woke up late, ate oatmeal, drank coffee, napped, showered, then took the train to figure drawing class…” Before and during class I texted Tallie—I told them I wished they were throwing a holiday dance party. They responded that they were throwing a holiday karaoke party. After class I bought groceries, and returned home to make dinner, cooking alongside Chris, and we shared a bottle of sparkling wine, and we talked about various things, our lives, our petty complaints, movies good and bad. I received a text from Austin, have you seen this movie? And in fact I had meant to go see the movie earlier, but forgot it in my post-drawing haze. And I received another text from Tallie, here’s the info for karaoke. And I decided to get up after dinner, a little drunk, to take the train to Manhattan and see the movie.
I laughed and I cried and I contemplated. I sat happily by myself in one of the nicer rooms at at the theater where you don’t hear the trains rumbling below. A couple sat directly next to me, which was strange, but I like when people do things to challenge my good grace, and I refuse to cooperate. I think the couple expected me to move a seat over, which I found preposterous. I had been sitting there for 15 minutes already, since I like to get to the movies early to choose a good seat. I pretended in my head that I was in a relationship with the two of them, an ill-advised throuple, and we were fighting. I was not able to penetrate their togetherness as the third. When the movie was over, I let them get up and leave ahead of me, and I thought well, there they go again.
I was so happy as I headed home from the movie. The concessions guy had given me a free beer. When I ordered it, he checked my ID, said something about the myth that derives my name, and then called me Cass, which tickled me. People have often called me that as a term of endearment, and others because they met me on an app where I call myself that. I want to be dear to everyone. When I was 6 or 7 I went through a period of wanting people to call me Cassandra, though I had been called Cassie all my life. My parents were amused by this. Across the back of my soccer jersey were all 9 letters, barely fitting on. I did not associate with this doomed and dignified woman, but I felt that I needed some other name. My soccer coach would call every day to ask, in his thick North Carolina drawl, if Cassandra was coming to the game, which my mom found hilarious, but took seriously. I scored all the goals, but preferred to dance. I continued feeling this about my name way long after I went back to the diminutive I was addressed by since birth. That Cassie was someone else, someone I recognized when I heard her called, but who wasn’t quite close, like Jane Eyre. Someone I was trying to be. I imagined that this was how most people felt about their names. That they were aspirational. My analyst—and Freud—are correct that the unconscious belies knowledge.
Or is it that knowledge belies the unconscious?
I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day. It’s not because I’m bitter. It is because the holiday encourages us to orchestrate intimacy with each other. We find these horrible ways of making everything just so. We overstate the ordinary, which is already magical, and doesn’t need our editorializing. And we try to bend circumstances to our will, never truly looking at the Other but only ever at ourselves. We do not trust the wind, or time. We must have a day on the calendar, a calendar which is also made up. A day that says: All the stories you have ever been told about love, the ones that keep you anxious and self-doubting and desperate and oppressed, the ones that give you hope at some notion of completeness, of wholeness, and of everlasting rightness which eludes you and always will—they’re all true. Do this dance and you’ll see.
I know almost nothing but I suspect that love is not anything like this. You cannot make it up. It is not eyes across the room. It is not “you get me like no one else does.” Here’s the truth: A lot of people will see things in you that you don’t see, at least not yet. The people you think get you so well, in a way that you already recognize as true? They are reflecting your shame back at you. Or your parents’ shame. They behave in a way that is familiar. They are behaving like “you.” This is the mutual recognition we’re told about over and over. The baby looking in their mother’s eyes. We fantasize about the end of our suffering when we really are only ever at the beginning, until we’re not, and then we’re dead. This sounds tragic because it is. Life only matters because there is this terrible sadness always swirling around us. Love only happens because we can lose. It’s all very ordinary and important.
And here’s what I think love is: It is everyone in my life who, when I told them stories, would ask me, again and again, but what about you? A question that, for years, I did not recognize in my fantasies and could not answer in the present. I could not hear my own name. But they kept asking. It is the way you can watch someone and see all of the little things about them that they do not see, that they do not love, and that that they surely take for granted, and how in those moments, you resist telling them. You ask instead. You are interested. You take your seat.