What Counts As Love
A few years ago, I attended a reading by one of the professors from my university. I went because it was part of a requirement from one of my writing classes. I hadn’t been writing, but that didn’t really matter until later, when the reading was over.
I sat down in the small auditorium that Loyola’s theater department used for plays, in small black seats covered with some sort of indeterminate red fabric that pilled like an old sweater. Dr. Crotty, my professor — although not really mine, as I never took a class with her — stood unobtrusively behind a podium. I remembered the podium from when I took a poetry class and my poetry teacher read a personal essay as way of introducing a featured author.
Dr. Crotty’s stories, or at least the one she read to the audience that day, talked about attraction and insecurities and the walk-in freezer of an old restaurant and suicide. In the midst of listening, I forgot where I was, a little, but not enough to forget that I wanted to write something of my own, if only to make ordinary events of my adolescence appear as broken pieces of something more significantly tragic.
Sitting in the audience of her reading, I tried to think of someone who pined over me the way that the boy from the restaurant pined over Dr. Crotty’s narrator in “Common Application With Supplement”. For years I had pined over the thought of someone giving me unconditional affection, even when I didn’t really deserve it. What could define love more than someone so devoted to you that they saw through your hard exterior to all that you could be. I don’t think this particular story was meant to invoke the title of the story collection — What Counts As Love — but I know that I felt something for the narrator’s seemingly one-sided relationship.
When Dr. Crotty was finished reading, someone in the audience asked a question I had sort of been wondering — was the story fiction or nonfiction? I just wanted to know if she had really fucked her ex-boyfriend’s brother after her mother tried to kill herself. In answering, she was coy, claiming that some aspects of the story were real while others were fabricated. And that she would not tell us which details were which. I thought the answer was a respectable cop out, and I wished my own stories were better at cloaking details of my life in the secrecy of fiction.
When I was a teenager, I used to think of love as a thick, impermeable thing, like a block of wood, or an apple before you’ve cut it. It was something one-sided, and strong but not impenetrable. When you spoke of it, it automatically meant something. As a tangible thing, it was hard because it was illogical, and to know it was not to make sense of it. I used to think that what counted as love was staring into someone’s eyes, feeling complete dependence, feeding fires and vulnerability and finally, at the end, ceasing to exist. I guess I thought the kind of love that was worth anything was the kind that meant almost certain death.
But this was all the thought of love as I had pictured it before I knew it. Or at least, an immature understanding of it. I had never been broken up with against my wishes, had not yet tried a long-distance relationship, was not yet sure what it felt like to say “I love you” more than once, unashamedly, and at the right time.
I watched this movie recently, Her, and teared up as I saw the fibers of what counts as love start to unravel a little. It’s about a man who has been systematically avoiding the finalization of his divorce, and in the process accidentally falls in love with an operating system — a computer designed as a organization tool/helpful companion. I don’t know whether it is utopian or dystopian, a world in which operating systems adapt to become almost human; in the film, some people are not on board, but others seems to automatically understand.
In the movie, one character says to another, in response to whether his love for a computer is crazy, that anyone who falls in love is crazy, because falling in love is a crazy thing to do. What could be more true? A kid I went to high school with wrote on twitter once that being in a relationship is like giving someone the power to ruin your life and hoping they decide to scratch your back instead. A crazy gamble.
Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about people who have gone through heartbreak. Not the kind brought about by unfortunate circumstance, but the kind where one person is finished and the other isn’t. The part of this kind of ache that I have been through only once and only briefly is that part that everyone who’s ever written a book or poem about what counts as love talks about. The part where your whole life feels like a straw caught in the bottom of a milkshake. Am I grasping too hard at similes here? I don’t know how to describe the feeling of innate despair that follows your every move, or the feeling of desperation, constant and hot. Does heartbreak hurt more when you aren’t the one to cause it? That’s when it hurt the most for me, but that just might be because I have always been used to being the one in control.
I’ve started to revise my vision of love — it seems more appropriate now to think of it as something gelatinous, something that stretches and changes shape and when you touch it with your hands it makes them sticky. I picture it as green, but the color isn’t important. What’s important is that it isn’t like anything you know, and it stays on the bottom of your shoe if you step on it, until you wipe it off. What do I think counts as love? Everything, I don’t know, nothing.
Everyone wants to know what counts as love, but that part doesn’t really matter. Here’s what does matter: finding people that you can imagine being alone with in a small cabin in the snow-covered woods. Teaching another person how to love something they hate about themselves. Making tea for someone when they are sick, cleaning dishes that aren’t yours, buying someone your favorite type of chocolate just because you want to know what they think. Eating raspberries outside, kissing only when you want to, taking consideration of the fact that sharing your life means giving away little pieces of yourself in exchange for little pieces of someone else.
I sat down in the small auditorium that Loyola’s theater department used for plays, in small black seats covered with some sort of indeterminate red fabric that pilled like an old sweater. Dr. Crotty, my professor — although not really mine, as I never took a class with her — stood unobtrusively behind a podium. I remembered the podium from when I took a poetry class and my poetry teacher read a personal essay as way of introducing a featured author.
Dr. Crotty’s stories, or at least the one she read to the audience that day, talked about attraction and insecurities and the walk-in freezer of an old restaurant and suicide. In the midst of listening, I forgot where I was, a little, but not enough to forget that I wanted to write something of my own, if only to make ordinary events of my adolescence appear as broken pieces of something more significantly tragic.
Sitting in the audience of her reading, I tried to think of someone who pined over me the way that the boy from the restaurant pined over Dr. Crotty’s narrator in “Common Application With Supplement”. For years I had pined over the thought of someone giving me unconditional affection, even when I didn’t really deserve it. What could define love more than someone so devoted to you that they saw through your hard exterior to all that you could be. I don’t think this particular story was meant to invoke the title of the story collection — What Counts As Love — but I know that I felt something for the narrator’s seemingly one-sided relationship.
When Dr. Crotty was finished reading, someone in the audience asked a question I had sort of been wondering — was the story fiction or nonfiction? I just wanted to know if she had really fucked her ex-boyfriend’s brother after her mother tried to kill herself. In answering, she was coy, claiming that some aspects of the story were real while others were fabricated. And that she would not tell us which details were which. I thought the answer was a respectable cop out, and I wished my own stories were better at cloaking details of my life in the secrecy of fiction.
When I was a teenager, I used to think of love as a thick, impermeable thing, like a block of wood, or an apple before you’ve cut it. It was something one-sided, and strong but not impenetrable. When you spoke of it, it automatically meant something. As a tangible thing, it was hard because it was illogical, and to know it was not to make sense of it. I used to think that what counted as love was staring into someone’s eyes, feeling complete dependence, feeding fires and vulnerability and finally, at the end, ceasing to exist. I guess I thought the kind of love that was worth anything was the kind that meant almost certain death.
But this was all the thought of love as I had pictured it before I knew it. Or at least, an immature understanding of it. I had never been broken up with against my wishes, had not yet tried a long-distance relationship, was not yet sure what it felt like to say “I love you” more than once, unashamedly, and at the right time.
I watched this movie recently, Her, and teared up as I saw the fibers of what counts as love start to unravel a little. It’s about a man who has been systematically avoiding the finalization of his divorce, and in the process accidentally falls in love with an operating system — a computer designed as a organization tool/helpful companion. I don’t know whether it is utopian or dystopian, a world in which operating systems adapt to become almost human; in the film, some people are not on board, but others seems to automatically understand.
In the movie, one character says to another, in response to whether his love for a computer is crazy, that anyone who falls in love is crazy, because falling in love is a crazy thing to do. What could be more true? A kid I went to high school with wrote on twitter once that being in a relationship is like giving someone the power to ruin your life and hoping they decide to scratch your back instead. A crazy gamble.
Sometimes I lie awake at night and think about people who have gone through heartbreak. Not the kind brought about by unfortunate circumstance, but the kind where one person is finished and the other isn’t. The part of this kind of ache that I have been through only once and only briefly is that part that everyone who’s ever written a book or poem about what counts as love talks about. The part where your whole life feels like a straw caught in the bottom of a milkshake. Am I grasping too hard at similes here? I don’t know how to describe the feeling of innate despair that follows your every move, or the feeling of desperation, constant and hot. Does heartbreak hurt more when you aren’t the one to cause it? That’s when it hurt the most for me, but that just might be because I have always been used to being the one in control.
I’ve started to revise my vision of love — it seems more appropriate now to think of it as something gelatinous, something that stretches and changes shape and when you touch it with your hands it makes them sticky. I picture it as green, but the color isn’t important. What’s important is that it isn’t like anything you know, and it stays on the bottom of your shoe if you step on it, until you wipe it off. What do I think counts as love? Everything, I don’t know, nothing.
Everyone wants to know what counts as love, but that part doesn’t really matter. Here’s what does matter: finding people that you can imagine being alone with in a small cabin in the snow-covered woods. Teaching another person how to love something they hate about themselves. Making tea for someone when they are sick, cleaning dishes that aren’t yours, buying someone your favorite type of chocolate just because you want to know what they think. Eating raspberries outside, kissing only when you want to, taking consideration of the fact that sharing your life means giving away little pieces of yourself in exchange for little pieces of someone else.
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