to love the world anyway

art by Djuno Tomsni

These are hard times all around. What that looks like and means is different and varied, wars and fires and shaking earth as the land slides, loss of homes and lives and families and futures, food insecurity and job insecurity and illness in health care systems breaking under the weight of corporate greed, loneliness and isolation as our technology moves at faster and faster speeds, conflict and polarization and authoritarianism and necropolitics decreeing who lives and who dies. Watching collapse is hard. Living in collapse is hard. Life right now is hard and frightening and changing. I realize this is not the cheeriest opening for a Valentines Day list of love on Venus Day. And, love is about more than cheer. It is the very element of imagination and visceral animal body reality that animates life. To love that which is here and that which will not last, to give oneself to this love, is a kind of magic.

I have not learned to love because things last. I have learned to love because they don’t. Because every touch of fingers tracing the rib cage, every inhale, every ecstatic knowing of the sublime, every moment of watching my son slip out of view as he entered his own worlds, every sip and immersion into water, is finite and temporal, as are we. This world is cracked and burning and bruised and our home, and I want to love like it is the last great act of imagination I have left. In a collapsing world, love is a defiance and a prayer of thank you, a queering and enchanted incantation that says: I will make altars out of everything they tell me is unworthy. I will travel through time and dimensions and know all of it as real. I will wake up every morning and love this world not for what it promises, but for what it is.

Because something in me has become sensitized. I woke up to a world that was ending, knowing it in my knees, in the way the air suddenly felt like the inside of a church I didn’t believe in. I woke up to the specs of matter and energy that we are in a vast universe and all I could do, all I wanted to do, was press my bare feet to the ground, feel earth and cold and sure beneath me. Let me stand here until my pulse syncs up with whatever the dirt has been humming since the first breath of the first person who ever lost something they couldn’t bear to lose. I woke up knowing everything I love was both here and changing. And so I want to do what my human animal instinct says. Grip tighter. Then let go. Then love harder.

A LOVE LIST

1. The Deep Hum of Thunder Rolling Through the Sky
To sit outside, letting the storm break open the sky and break over me. To feel the air heavy with electricity, feel the charged space between sky and skin.

2. The First Time You See the Moon’s Reflection in Water and Feel Like You Might be Dreaming
The shimmer of it, the possibility. The way the night bends itself into magic.

3. Honey on the Tongue
Sticky, golden, slow. Proof that something so sweet can come from work, from devotion, from the impossible precision of bees.

4. Survival as an Ungovernable Act
They don’t want us to survive. They don’t want us to thrive. So we do. We keep each other fed, housed, laughing. We do not apologize for it.

5. Touch That Says: I Know You’re Real
The palm on the nape. The knuckle brushed along a jaw. The support of back to back, leaning in. The assurance, in a world of disembodiment, that we exist in three dimensions. That we are not ghosts. Not yet.

6. Every Breath My Son Breathes
Every moment, every element, every breath that gives him life, that sustains his life, that is his life. The quiet, steady insistence of his life—this one miraculous, mortal, impossible possible life. He is my son, and I love him.

7. The Witchcraft of Staying
Not resilience. Not endurance. But the radical magic of presence, of saying: I am here. I am here even when here is unbearable.

8. A Hand Pressed Flat Against a Windowpane in Winter
One side burning cold, the other warmed by your own blood. The meeting place between inside and out, body and storm.

9. Speaking in Spells
Saying “Be safe” and meaning “I love you.” Saying “Take care” and meaning “Don’t you dare fucking die.” Saying “See you soon” and meaning “I am holding onto you across time and space.” Saying "goodnight" and meaning "I'll come find you in every universe and life in every dimension."

10. Precarity as a Portal
If we are always about to lose everything, then we are always standing at the threshold of new worlds. The trick is to be intentional about which world we build when the old one crumbles.

11. The Exact Shape of my Wife's Laughter. The Creativity of her Adaptations. The Weight of her Head on my Shoulder
Let me pull this, her, close and memorize the exact pressure of her leaning into me, the warmth of her cheek against my collarbone. Do not rush this moment. Stay still, stay present, feel every inch of her form pressed against me until it is an imprint that changes the very shape of me.

12. Art That Refuses to be Useful
A poem that does nothing but make your insides become rearranged. A painting that exists for no one but itself. An unfinished song hummed under the breath.

13. Queerness as Rebellion, Queerness as Love, Queerness as a Way of Being
Not just an identity, but a way of seeing, of rupturing, of breaking and remaking. Queerness as an erotic devotion to life itself, despite, against, through. Queerness as how we keep each other alive.

14. The Sound of Someone Breathing in the Dark
Not snoring. Just breathing. Just being alive beside you, steady and warm, when the world outside is sharp and cold.

15. The Stubborn Bloom of a Wildflower in a Parking Lot
No soil, no invitation, just the will to be beautiful anyway.

16. Ritual as Architecture for the Unbearable
A candle lit every morning. Salt in the pockets. Writing the name of dead people on a wall in a shed in rural Michigan and letting it become a holder of memory. A structure for sorrow, a shape for love.

17. Love That Lives Through Many Lifetimes
Knowing she will come. Knowing there is always a place. Knowing my need and my changings and my oldest stories have a home in another person.

18. The Crackle of a Vinyl Record Before the Music Starts
That hushed anticipation, the waiting, the knowing that something is about to begin.

19. The Freedom to Be Useless to Capitalism
Lying in bed all day. Making art no one sees. Holding hands and doing nothing else. Love as refusal to be productive.

20. Kissing With Teeth
A love that leaves marks. That says: I was here. You were here. And nothing, not even time, can undo that.

21, The Way Fireflies Blink in Synchrony
How they find each other in the dark. How they make a pattern out of longing.

22 The Cool, Still Darkness Of Lake Water
The cottage that carries my memories, and the sound of the lake's ripple against warm air, and the clothesline where I clipped pages of writing, and the feeling of swimming in quiet, of being held by something deep and dark and before me

23.The Press of Warm Laundry Against My Chest
To bury my face in it. To let the warmth sink into me, let it remind me of home, of care, of the small, unnoticed acts of love that make up a life.

24. The Glow of Streetlights Against Wet Pavement
To walk through the city at night, watching reflections shimmer beneath my feet. The way this feels like a secret door opening and other dimensions could appear just around the corner.

25. The Knowing That We Have Been Here Before and We Will Be Here Again
That time loops, that history stutters, that even in the worst of it, we are part of something vast and circling and full of teeth and fire and love.