On Death & Love Languages
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My life isn’t mine when it isn't yours
I like my food when it's the part you don't want
I like songs when they're something we would dance to
I like my hair when it's soft enough to run your hands through
It wreaks of a lust a few sizes too small for me now, and always too big for who it is about. This limerence had made me physically ill: my toenails fell off, and I slept in sweatpants through the summer.
I remember a teacher describing me and my middle school best friend as “attached at the hip”. When she was done with her chewing gum, I would proudly hold out my hand and take it from her. If she was eating an orange, I would eat the rinds and claim they were my favorite part until they truly were. I’ve tried to interpret this disposition, and while I never felt cool enough to be her friend, I think there was more to this habit. My inborn love language. I would eventually move on from the longing, but the sentiment is something I’d never outgrow, for it is the body itself. I wrote to a friend in autumn:
Among many titles, you are an expert hostess, and I’ve been indulging in those memories of you. In July, you asked me which sandwich I wanted out of the two you had made. Caprese on homemade focaccia. I sat in your backyard, de-pruning from the pool and hiding my un-pedicured toes under the ottoman. The air smelled like rosemary and chlorine. You sat up in front of the creations, holding your mozzarella-water hands open to the sky, awaiting my response. I told you I wanted the one you didnt want, your second choice, and we ate them.
****
I evaluate each option on the screen carefully. They are, words of affirmation, acts of service, receiving gifts, quality time, and physical touch. I think of the stale gum and orange peels as I click “acts of service”, and move on to the next question, which is the inverse of the first.
“My preferred love language to receive is…”
I think of the friends I made at the end of highschool, after I had finally found solitude in my teenage loneliness. We were immediately close, and even closer when we left for university. Nowadays, we pass a journal around of our lives that sprawles with wristbands and stickers. When we are home for holidays, we have devoted tasks at dinner parties. Each month, we remind each other to write letters to the moon, and our long distance texts read something like a newspaper, with dramatic headlines and advice columns. One time, we turned Altoids tins into discrete containers for joints, complete with cherry printed wallpaper on the inside, and an elastic strap for a lighter. Even our teenage rebellion had debris of hot glue strings and glitter.
There was no surprise or contest when Olivia proposed we make vision boards on the New Years Eve of 2023. Cardstock, gel pens, magazines, glue sticks, and three of us sprawled around her dinner table, getting our fingers stuck together while waiting for Miley Cyrus’ performance at the Time Square Ball Drop.
My friends worked carefully to keep a consistent color palate and choose placements for their magazine clippings. Inspirational and hopeful quotes in pretty fonts and silver linings, botanical stickers, and personal goals.
Confronted with the ominous blankness of my cardstock, I cried hysterically and predictably. What could I wish for greater than what we had in these four walls? These girls who not only gave me the center of the orange, but who would peel a thousand of them for me? Time was moving and I was afraid.
My tears smeared the gel pens and hands failed to cut straight lines, resorting to ripping the magazines with my fingers. I mostly chose pictures of celebrities, though further specificities of what relates them to each other remains unclear. Mathew McConaughty, Gizelle and Tom Brady, Obama, Asap Rocky, Rihana and their baby, Emily Ratajkowski, and Gwenyth Paltrow. There are three beverage ads: Bella Hadid’s brand of Kin Euphorics, a painting of a martini, and a beer posed next to a woman who bears a resemblance to Mariah Carey. In the top left corner, there is Princess Diana’s Time Magazine cover, pointed to by text written in cursive metallic sharpie, reading, “there is something so female about being dead,” above an unconvincing disclaimer, “this is a famous poem, I want to live!”
I thought about death everyday, but it was true that I wanted to live. Some nights, my heart would pound so hard, it woke me up. I would blink a hundred times to try and make my eyelids too heavy to stay open, and when that didn't work, I’d slither to the kitchen and eat a spoonful of almond butter. The logic was that it would coat my heart enough to slow it down, and it worked most of the time. I thought about death, but not in a real way, and everytime I worried I was close, I begged God not to let me go.
My teenage years were dissolving. I couldn’t have cared less about my future, but also resented it for its thievery. I felt time become even thinner in the summer, when my best friends and I took a trip to southern California. One night, we took our Altoids containers for a walk around the neighborhood of our Airbnb to see the fireworks from the Padre’s stadium.
“I love you guys more than I could ever love anyone, I think,” I said, and we watched the smoke make silhouettes of black palm trees.
We had spent that day on a busy beach, braiding our hair and daring each other to get into the freezing water. We ate ice cream for lunch, and later celebrated my 20th birthday with a slice of grocery store red velvet cake and “sparkler” candles that almost set the whole place on fire. We talked about our futures, how many kids we wanted, and how we imagined each other older. We talked about marriage, and that's when I first thought of how loving anyone like I love these girls seemed impossible.
I love you guys more than I could ever love anyone.
My best friends gave me love like the whole orange, not just the peel, to the point that the rinds didn’t taste so edible. The thought of not being so near them met me later in a deep summer depression. My suitcase from California stayed packed on my bedroom floor for months. One night, I dreamt I was on a giant hill with all of them, on grass too full to see its roots. We were running down to the foot, all of our faces frozen in an open and breathless smile. The weather was something between late spring and the blue hour. It was my favorite thing in the month of July.
When Olivia’s 21st birthday passed, I wrote her in email:
That morning in DC, after another encounter with a Drake-coded man, and getting kicked out of the bar. When we were the first ones awake, and we hung out in the bathroom because the toilet had broken, but also so as to not disrupt the sleeping pile of girls in the living room – we whispered and giggled at our circumstances while you scrolled through your missed calls and I shoved a pink comb under the toilet valve to stop it from running. This is where I told you my mother is a self proclaimed tom-boy, and taught me the basics of plumbing. You picked my nose, and eventually it was time to get moving. Did I ever tell you that it is one of my favorite moments of my life?
What can I say besides to know me is truly to know you? You gave me all my favorite parts of me, including but not limited to knowing all of the lyrics to Barbie Dreams by Nicki Minaj. Olivia, you are my first love in every way that matters.
My preferred love language to receive is whatever we are speaking with each other.
****
I cleaned the sand out of my suitcase and brought my things to the south of France for my third year of university. In the first few months of being here, I pretended I was not. I wake up to the bells from a thousand year old church, and a sweet man playing the accordion. I used to drown them out with the same Fleetwood Mac songs everyday. Over and over again I would play them, like it was the first Sunday I was here, alone in august heatwave. I pretended my dad opened every jar in this kitchen cabinet, and hid a pack of cigarettes from my mother in the bookshelves. There are still days when the only way I’ll leave my bed is to pretend I am seventeen again.
Olivia, there are all of these people, and none of them are you
****
I fought to become the keeper of time, so it kept me instead. For months, and what will be a year, I have only heard the voice of the girls I sat around that dinner table with over the phone. I've broken off all of my nails, grown them back, then broken them off again. My California sunburns are peeled and gone, and the lipgloss I bought over two years ago, and shared with all of my girl friends, is running low. I lived through the inescapable passing of time, and I am not the same. Just as orange peels don't taste so edible anymore, I no longer believe that preservation is my destiny.
I spent a week of fall in London walking through its damp streets; two hands clutching a crooked umbrella, my hair stuck in my lipgloss, and the bottoms of my jeans dragging on the pavement. I giggled to myself, watching men in suits shove themselves into taxis.
On a sunnier day, I took a bus to the Calanques. The impossibly blue water reminded me of a leotard I wore when I believed I'd grow up to be a ballerina. I swam there, too, and made conversation with an older french man about the heat wave and mosquitos. Later on the shore, I ate what I didn't know would be my last fig of the season, and tragically left my favorite golden hair clip on a rock.
My winter was spent in the glow of thousands of light garlands. I walked past a bakery on my way to school everyday, and took a deep breath. When I came home, there would often be a man playing the violin, and sometimes a pianist bundled up. Every morning, there were new cigarette butts on my doorstep, and their shameless perpetrators sitting outside the bodega facing it, innocently putting the first link on the new day.
I went to Cassis, a beach town an hour south of Aix. A little one facing me on the train hummed, “The Girl From Ipanema”, and as I sat there reading my book I felt the presence of an older version of myself, peaking over my shoulder. When we finally arrived at the station, this unfamiliar woman and I, we walked down to the beach and found a spot in the pleat of a rock, pushed up against an even bigger rock. She marched me towards the ocean, over the pebbles and towels. We swam out to the billow of its belly, and I smiled like I'd discovered the last piece of the matrix. And in a way, I had – this feeling of wholeness, in all of its deconstructed glory, my ability to hold all of that unknowing without being devoured by it. I had a secret no one else knew, only her, who was slowly disappearing into the blue, and the blue itself, holding us in its swell, and maybe the bathers who now dried at the shore.
Olivia, it is a weird feeling to trust the bottomless ocean, but sometimes I am brave enough to stop treading and let the salt hold me.
