Introduction

“You’ve got this very narrow definition of love,” my therapist told me yesterday. “What about your friend who you went on a walk with this week? What about your sponsor, who always calls you back? These people are giving you their time. Time is our most precious resource because you can never get your time back. You shouldn’t take them for granted.”

I sniffled into my tissue. I felt both offended and curious at the same time. Was I taking these people for granted? Were there more things, more people, more ways of loving than I had imagined until now?

Challenge accepted, I thought to myself. So, here are ten alternative forms of love. Some forms of love come from other people. Some don’t. Some don’t mean anything. But as my favorite line in Rick Rubin’s book, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being,” goes:

“The universe never explains why.”

1. Gift Shop Love

Around Christmas, I am in my favorite gift shop in the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. Beneath the high ceiling arches, older women are dashing between makeshift boutique corners in silk coats and wide-rimmed glasses.

There is the kind of orgasmic ecstasy that I feel. There are trinkets, but not the junky kind. These are the types of trinkets I desperately want in my house, but each costs £15. A postcard box of 100 unique William Morris textile designs. A poster of a 1920s flapper girl dancing in a mink coat. A book about the forgotten female architects of the Bauhaus.

Each thing I encounter catches my eye, pinches my heart, and whispers in my ear. Until the whole row of everything I see is singing to me, the vibrations of my visual cortex and my creative potential clash into a mound of pure, unaltered glee. I buy the print-making kit and the watercolor kit to go with it because I am an artist now.

2. Atmospheric Love

I stand in the shadowed corner of the bar, Tlecán, near my house. The rhythmic thumping, the snare, and the twanging guitar of the Cumbia music swing overhead. The air is thick with twirls of white smoke, copal. Its sweetness transports me to sitting around a fire in a vast valley in Oaxaca some thousand years prior. I wonder where Mother Earth or this copal tree is calling me from. I wonder what this whisp of smoke is trying to say to me. The bar is covered from floor to ceiling with smooth stone as if I have entered a volcanic cave. I feel my hands along the bar, along the walls. The stone grounds me to the Earth. There’s no Wi-Fi or phone signal in here, but I hardly care. I drink a straight mezcal. The smoky husk of it clings to the back of my throat and awakens me. Later, on my laptop sitting at my desk, I search the meaning of the word “Tlecán.” In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, it means “place of fire.”

3. Old Friend Phone Call Love

We haven’t spoken in six months. There’s nothing urgent to say, but I put my shoes on anyway, connect my phone, and hope the phone signal will be good enough as I’ll be taking a long walk. We are pulling the strings of our lives back together after some separation. Like we have all tangled together again in this web they call time.

My friend’s father has died. I’m not sure whether to bring it up. This awkwardness, this feeling of knowing too much and yet drifting apart in the details, confuses me. Do you go there? Do they want to talk about it?

I settle on bringing up a funny detail from our past. As a freshman pledge class, we had to perform an 80s jazzercize dance to the fraternity house. One member looked directly at my friend and said, “Tristan, it looks like you snorted one line of commitment.” Tristan had forgotten that anecdote. We laugh.

I realize that this is what friendship means. You each remember threads of the other’s life. I realize that we walk around telling ourselves something all day, except that this is only about half of who we are. I am not my own story of myself, even. These old friends hold the other details I’ve forgotten. They will piece me back together and remind me of who I am if I let them. I wonder how it got to be that I live so far away from everyone I care so deeply about.

4. Writing Love

The words flow out of me onto the imagined digital screen page. My fingers twitch as an extension of the synapses firing in my brain. I am but one and the page. I worry I am creating too many words that no one will ever care to read them. I can recall only cliché things to say and wish I were more widely read.

But the words. The way of the words on the page. Having something to say. Yes. You never don’t have anything left to say. Sometimes, it’s okay that you struggle to find them. But put the pen in your hand. But sit down at the keyboard. And give yourself the breath to say whatever it is that you want to say. And it’s like you’ve regained the river inside of you.

The river was always there, flowing at great speeds through me like a life force. I only had to take a breath, forgive myself, and face it once more. I am the one writing the words, and yet the things that come out of me transport me to places I didn’t know existed. I make a promise to myself that I will cherish this gift more. Don’t sit down at the page with worry, I tell myself. Instead, it is a blessing not to know.

Let the words take you to where you don’t yet know you want to go.

5. Airport Love

Eternally cliché. I arrive after many hours sweating in anxiety across the Atlantic Ocean to the cold place I used to call home. Both my parents have come to pick me up. My mum was stopping in Marks and Spencer because she loves their Christmas biscuit tins shaped like winter houses. We meet in the lobby of Café Nero because I had to chug a coffee or otherwise die from the jetlag. She hugs me. I walk with her to the car park, where my dad is waiting with the dogs. He hugs me, also.

I’m not sure where to start in my busy life I’ve been living abroad, but I can’t shake the edge off my shoulders. I’m almost 29. Some of my friends lost their fathers this year. I get this hunching, sneaking suspicion as I sip my coffee in the back of the car beside the wet, dirt-covered dog towels. Your parents won’t be around forever. And yet your relationship with them is complex, also. I tell myself I will do my best not to argue with them or get into any shouting matches. I’ll do my best to enjoy this time with them. Rarely anywhere else do I get the sense that time in its very breath is limited.  ‍

6. Knitting Love

“That’s a nice sweater,” I say to a girl at a barbecue.

Her sweater is navy with beautiful embroidered, criss-crossed flowers over the shoulders and the arms. It’s knitted in a pink pattern. I’ve never seen anything like it.

“Oh, thank you,” she says, “My friend made it for me.”

My eyes open wide. Each detailed stitch of the pink embroidered flowers now seems more brilliant. I can almost see the time her friend put into it. With the right size, the yarns, the pattern? How long would that take? What is that type of embroidered stitching even called? You cannot fathom this.

You gaze at the jumper like you are stepping through a window, tasting for a second how deeply one person could care for another. There would be no wars in the world, you think to yourself, if more people were knitting jumpers for each other like these.

You think of your great-grandmother, who sewed your sleepy blanket and sleepy pillows. The matching Christmas dresses your grandmother made for you and your sister. Yours red, hers dark green. With wide, white, brimmed collars. You think about how your grandmother now struggles to swipe to answer your FaceTime calls in size 100 font on her iPad. How those hands once sewed your Christmas stockings and cooked the Turkey and pumpkin pies to perfection and one year even made hand-painted, hollowed-out eggshell ornaments for each of your siblings.

7. Starry Sky Love

I only get to see the sky like this in the remote mountains of Northern California once per year. I’m surrounded by wilderness where the summer season, the crisp mountain air, and the arid pine trees stretch out like extensions of my body all around me. I am on the dock on the shoreline, lying rooted to the ground, while the vast array of stars cascades across every inch of my front, scraping the edges of the mountain basin I sit in.

I forget, even, that there are just as many stars if not more, below you on the other side of the Earth that I can’t even see. I think about how infinitesimal the possibility was that humans would even exist and that I would even be alive. And that my little life is but a flick of an atom of air in the nostril of the breathing universe.

I realize Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. I could change the world, also. I am seeing light emitted from stars that happened before Westminster Abbey was built in London a thousand years ago. I feel the magnitude of their twinkling, and I swear to myself that I will not go gently into that good night. I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I still don’t know why I’m here. But I vow to do something to bend the arch of humanity. It’s the only job I’ll ever have.

8. Freeway Love

It had been a dream of mine to road trip through America. But I lost my physical driving license card during the pandemic and couldn’t get it replaced. I managed to live in America for eight years and spend fifteen summers there, but I never got behind the wheel of a car.

Then I find my driving license in the broken seams of my mother’s fancy, now-tattered red purse, which I’ve had for ages. And so, in Los Angeles, the place where my grandfather was born almost 100 years ago, I get behind the wheel.

Except that as I’m driving past the Santa Monica mountains, heading to the Palisades after dinner with a friend in the Valley, I cry and cry. I’m playing Adele at full blast, that sad, nostalgic song, Hometown Glory. I don’t know why I’m crying. Maybe it’s the rush of freedom at last, the repetitive, broken, white stripes separating the lanes across the smoothed black curves of the road. Maybe it’s the realization that I’m living my dream. Maybe it’s the reckoning that I’m an adult now, about a third of the way through my life if I’m lucky enough to make it that far.

Or maybe it’s because my grandmother is sitting bed-ridden in an old people’s home in Pico-Robertson and that’s the inevitability of life, isn’t it? We’re all getting older and there’s nothing we can do about it. And the sense of everything in my childhood suddenly being lost, even though it had been running away from me for ages, and I was too busy living to notice.

Or that the ghosts of your great-grandparents and their lives and your grandfather and his life and all your other Jewish ancestors you wish you could have known who settled in LA in the early 1900s are floating all around you. The spirits of them, living on inside of me even now, as I see the red speed dial flicker up and recede against the invisible baseboard of the car’s body. I am still me, a living and fallible human, but I am an embodiment of them also.

9. Message Love

I hold the old, kitschy card in my hand. It has kittens on it. Inside is a message from the chaplain at my old university who taught me my first year. It was an Urban Studies class about social change. In that kitschy kitten card, in a somewhat spiked scribble, he wrote to me,

“In you, I see an aspiring CEO, a journalist, and an entrepreneur. But, Tash, you’re so much more than a career. So proud of the woman you are becoming.”

It was something my little heart needed to hear. It’s been almost eight and half years since he wrote that. I have carried it with me through every move and every season of my life since.

The beauty of a single, pointed thing that had to be said. It might be a phrase. It might be a little paragraph or a chin wag that you tell someone you love after you pull them aside at your auntie’s birthday party. That pinch of an idea on the tip of your tongue, at the end of your pen that liberates another person. As Maya Angelou says: Love that liberates. It doesn’t bind.

10. Sister Love

We take a trip to Wales in the winter, just the three of us and our dog. We snuggle in a cozy cottage as the dark blaze of a windy, wet winter rages outside. We cook what we can and make each other dinner and play Scrabble. We clean out the caravan one of my sisters had bought, hauling decades of crap into the shed outside. The place is still a dump, but we put in a couple days work to help her fix it up a bit.

You double-take as you throw old, discarded wellies onto the rubbish heap. You wonder if you will bring your children here and make memories with them once your sister has the financing to build a house on the property. You take some pictures of your sisters pulling the chain to start the generator so that you can remember these moments when it was raining and there was more rubbish than house and your sister had a long and daunting project ahead of her. You are grateful that your bodies are still young, doing this haul. You consider that starting a project like this at age 60 or older would make no physical sense. You are young. You have energy now. You can blast music on some speakers into the wilderness as you chuck stuff. You savor this vitality.  

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