The Love I Know

on family and friendship

There's a memory I have of the waning summer in Berlin, sharing a cigarette with Kate on the edge of the canal. Drunkenly, I note the light reflecting off the water, the illuminated face of the river shining back at me through their eyes.

"Why do you think we never dated?" I ask them, deadly serious but smiling.

"I don't know," they say before a pause, looking off into the distance or maybe at me. Or maybe no time at all in fact elapses between these two phrases, as I am recounting a picture of a moment from years ago. Whether finally or immediately, they say this: "I think probably because we want to stay in each other's lives forever." Kate does not remember this moment, which doesn't mean it never happened.

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The previous summer, Kate and I had shacked up together, sharing my studio apartment in Los Angeles. They were taking summer classes and I begged them to come live with me until they went back to school in the fall. In hindsight, I should have known that if a summer with Kate couldn't make Los Angeles bearable, then nothing would.

We bickered like two people stuck in a 500 sqft box. I got offended every time they slept on the couch instead of in bed with me. They ventured out on their own and got to know my neighbors while I wasted away on the internet and complained that there was nothing to do. People sometimes found it absurd that Kate would have moved across the country to live under such conditions.

"If you moved for a boyfriend," I recall saying from the deep end of an apartment complex pool we had broken into, "no one would say a fucking thing. They would all be like, congratulations!"

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Looking across the city of Los Angeles from the Griffith observatory can feel like looking forward through time. At least that’s how it felt at the end of that summer, our knees knocking into each other, our sentences overlapping. Kate used to speak like they expected our relationship would end at any moment, constantly eulogizing from the present.

“I’m really glad we got this summer together,” they said that night at the observatory. “But I can only imagine things getting more complicated from here.” I thought for a moment.

“More complicated, yeah,” I replied. The wind was particularly strong that season. I remember it brushing up against my face. “But unfortunately you’re not getting rid of me.” I must have said something else, too. Something poetic or stupid enough to get them to come around to temporarily agreeing with me — which they always did, even in the most pessimistic of moments.

I remember thinking that I’d spend my whole life bucking up against the truth of living while loving someone this much. The two seem mostly incompatible, the shape of devotion rarely contained in something Earthly or understandable. I cannot fit the totality of my love for you in this world, and so I make the world larger. I am always chasing the tail-end of limits I imagine for my existence, confounding myself with the endless expansion. People have spoken of love as a force that unites all disjointed parts, something that makes everything else click into place. For me, there is a dual reverence and terror for the force I have felt, the one that can split atoms and explode the whole world. The other day, I peeked into a Church past sundown and saw a woman laying in the aisle, her head pressed into the burgundy carpet. I understood.

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When my now long-term boyfriend and I decided to graduate from fucking casually to admitting we were hopelessly in love with each other, I disclosed my situation with Kate the way one might reveal a terminal diagnosis. I informed him that Kate was my life partner, and I intended to build my future around my relationship with them with a seriousness most women reserve only for their husbands. To be clear, I added, I was not beyond also wanting a husband.

He understood, and agreed to that unknowable yet absolutely assured future even before meeting them. Before that trip to Berlin, where he and I laid together in an unfamiliar bed and said that we wanted to spend our lives together, getting old and holding each other. Before we moved to New York, where Kate lives. Before we bought the couch in our living room that they regularly crash on, in the middle of the week, just because we’re all together now. Before the world expanded and exploded again and again and again.

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We’ve all just returned from a week in North Carolina — the place my boyfriend and I grew up. Kate built substantial rapport with my eight-year-old sister as we accompanied her to Family Day at her camp, delighting in the confusion of onlookers who likely assumed we were either too young or too gay to be her parents.

She may not have all of the memories, but my sister has known Kate since she was just a few years old. My sister will know her sister as a person who was lucky enough to trust the unwieldy, expansive path of building a family that is beyond the word we have given it. The world may try to scare her into believing that her life must fit inside it, but she will know that this is not the truth.

Eight years old, I think, is when I started to turn sideways in the mirror and put my hand over my mouth when I laughed. At eight years old, my sister runs with reckless abandon and dances to the Cha Cha Slide like the sun is her spotlight. When she looks at me, sliding to the left, sweat dripping down her cheek, smiling, I can feel the texture of the world break apart once again. As always, I am astounded. It was so much more beautiful than I could imagine. But now I can imagine it.