love is...
A quiet morning spent over coffee and pastries next to someone you care about.
Taking a suboptimal subway route home so you can spend a little more time together.
Breakfasts at the Google office. Breakfasts that are a few hours longer than you intended them to be. Breakfasts where no conversation is off limits. Breakfasts that are fodder for other people's eavesdropping.
Sending songs, playlists, albums, long-form articles, short stories, Google Maps lists, unhinged screenshots, a stolen photo of Joe Jonas at the coffee shop you’re at, and online shopping links to each other.
Standing, crowded against a wall somewhere between the kitchen and the living room, as one often does in the confines of a cozy New York apartment, as your friend makes an announcement. He thanks everyone for coming to the potluck he’s hosted, saying it’s the first he’s held in the city to celebrate Lunar New Year. As the people in the room cheer and awe, the room feels imbued with a bit of warmth and magic.
A recurring Google Calendar invite.
Texting when you get home safe.
An unscheduled phone call with someone you haven’t talked to for a long time. The call is a form of time travel and makes you feel as though they are right next to you.
A scheduled phone call that’s taken multiple text conversations and rescheduling to nail down. But once it happens, it lasts for hours and you can’t help but miss them more when it’s done.
Going to the same pilates class with the same people with the same instructor every week.
Catching up after saying you’ll catch up for weeks, sometimes months. On some random Saturday morning or Wednesday evening it happens.
Working side by side in a coffee shop, company office, or some random hotel lobby that looks nice.
Running in the pouring rain together. Running in the blazing heat together. Honestly, running with someone, period.
Sitting in silence on a subway together when you’re both tired.
Today is a day about love, and I found it as good of an excuse as any to write a little bit about it this morning. What I’ve learned about myself in the past few months is that love is what brings me back to writing time after time. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but I hope it brings you a little bit of joy as it did to me, and maybe inspires you to write your own. If you do, I’d love to read it.
To send you off on your day, here’s one of my favorite quotes about love from Fleabag, which is not-so-coincidentally my favorite TV show of all time. I think about this definition of love on a regular basis and believe it embodies how I feel about love best.
Love is awful. It’s awful. It’s painful. It’s frightening. It makes you doubt yourself, judge yourself, distance yourself from the other people in your life. It makes you selfish. It makes you creepy, makes you obsessed with your hair, makes you cruel, makes you say and do things you never thought you would do. It’s all any of us want, and it’s hell when we get there. So no wonder it’s something we don’t want to do on our own. I was taught if we’re born with love then life is about choosing the right place to put it. People talk about that a lot, feeling right, when it feels right it’s easy. But I’m not sure that’s true. It takes strength to know what’s right. And love isn’t something that weak people do. Being a romantic takes a hell of a lot of hope. I think what they mean is, when you find somebody that you love, it feels like hope.
And with that, thank you to everyone, near and far, for giving me so much hope. I will never be able to express my gratitude enough, but I’ll spend my whole life trying to do so.
im uwu (4 u)