Recently and inadvertently, I identified a gesture that makes me feel so loved. It's not the gesture, itself. I would have never recognized it as something that made me feel loved except that it is something that almost all of the people in my life I feel incredibly loved by have in common. And so, in almost a reverse engineered manner: I feel loved when people do or say this because almost all of the people who have made me feel so, incredibly loved have this tendency:
When parting ways at night, they ask me to tell them when I get home.
(pause)
I.
Let me tell you about joy.
To do so, I will have to tell you about a person I have loved for many years. Someone I have been friends with, dated, been friends with again and who I negotiated away a wedding plan with at some point in there.
I love who he is. I love our connection and our absurd and constant hilarity, yet our seriousness when it matters. I love the attention we pay to each other. The details we retain of each other's histories, families, dates, irrational phobias, guilty pleasures and dreams.
We share the same love of scents. Each time we meet up we wear something complex because we know the other person will push their nose up to that curve behind the other's ear, and inquire; then discuss. (Who knew Viktor & Rolf released a second version of Spicebomb? Now I know. My God, now I know.)
I love, simply but fully, how much we enjoy each other. Make fun of each other. Know each other. How we don't even have to discuss the fact that, yes, there will be at least two kinds of hot sauce on the popcorn (each kind on a separate side of the bowl) while we watch some movie or idiotic television show at his house, talking a quarter of the time, all while under either a blanket or his elegant and beautiful dog that is almost bigger than I am.
II.
For the first part of the night we sat at a bar and, as is the annoying obligatory presence, some random white guy interrupted our conversation with the same tired ass line of "I'm sorry to interrupt you" (they never are) followed by some pseudo-intellectual crap of how they were trying to identify the exact accent of Spanish we were using (the punchline is that these dudes almost never know more than even three words of the language) which they then use as a launchpad to talk about their travels to Spanish-speaking countries. Like who gives a fuck, Chad?
In these situations, there is always a balance to feel out and to act upon: I name/jab at the interruption in order to check the person and situation for what it is (some weird, racist, colonizer attempt at monopolizing strangers' time to play out their Christopher Columbus and/or "adventurer" fantasies). At the same time, there's this fucked line of things.
Typically, being a woman-read person, if I'm a dick to a guy and am with another guy, the guy I'm a dick to doesn't go after me: He goes after the guy I am with. It's a bizarre function of sexism. It gets tricky. I have to know that the level of aggression I spit towards some idiot may end up making the person I am with a target in a way they hadn't bargained for. When the asshole is a white dude and the guy I'm with is a man of color who has English as a second language, the balance becomes even tighter/more important. This balance is something that I think about so much. So much of maintaining it has to do with the endless variables in endless situations that no one asked for.
III.
Let me tell you about joy.
When we left the bar and went to his house to continue hanging out, I had this moment of experiencing just the pure joy of us both laughing while he was asking and I was trying to explain the concept of "teenage angst". (Ask yourself: How would you explain this concept to someone? I can almost guarantee you that you will end up laughing while doing some kind of impersonation of the concept.) The conversations he and I have about language are different from any others I have. He used to work as a language assistant years ago. He and I are both so serious when it comes to understanding meaning and nuance, but also laugh like hell knowing that we will never fully understand each other's language. I love these conversations. I love things like him laughing at me when I forget the word for "comb" and, instead, use some janky circumlocution that involves the phrase "the plastic thing you organize your hair with".
(pause)
It got late. He welcomed me to stay. I knew I had to go home.
Before I left, he pulled out a worn leather bag from his closet. It was a medical bag of sorts from WWII that he had gotten in Poland. I know that you love tijeras, Tía*- and he opened the bag that had about fifteen pairs of antique looking scissors- I love them, too. I picked up a few different pairs. My eyes widened. Each were both delicate and heavy all at once. When I picked up a particular pair, my pulse quickened. Admittedly, I don't think they even constitute being scissors- they are more of a surgical tool that look like scissors. They gave such a satisfying and heavy snap when you closed them. I thanked him, and slipped them in my bag.
He walked me outside.
We hugged.
I started making my way down the steps to my car.
Text me when you get home, Tía.
be well; be loved,
k.
(*= He calls me "Tía" because he's making fun of the accent and slang I have from some of my friends and teachers who are from Spain. He's always trying to scrub me of that slang and accent and, as part of it, he calls me Tía and, because of my ever-bratty-sister composure, I call him Tío in return. He hates it.)
(image: Javier Torok via untrustyou tumblr)
