a love that saves.
"What does friendship mean to you?"
I miss the harmattan. There is an awkwardness to the dust that settles back on the furniture just a few short minutes after cleaning, that is comforting. The way the dust rises to fill the streets with every little disturbance. The heat tumbling through the morning fog, piercing the cold to become sunlight. Air blowing hot and cold, creating a balance that, despite the discomfort of constant sneezing and chapped lips, felt safe. Like home.
A humbling lesson from the past week has been that the semblance of stability that comes from having a routine is more or less arbitrary. A minor health issue at the start of the week and some inconvenience from a phone carrier led to every plan I had set for the week completely falling apart, even though I had settled nicely into a routine of oscillating movements within my apartment and around the community.
I would come to spend forty eight hours tweeting about how the ‘technology oligarchy’ has doomed all of humanity and the robots are taking over; but not before I sent a total of one-hour long voice notes filled with complaints to my friends.
The sixteen months I’ve been away from home has been the same — marked by long hours of complaining to my friends about things they cannot control while they just listen to me, offering assurance or advice, and sometimes, hope. Within this time, I have made new friends, fallen out with old friends, found myself lodged in new romance, and flames that spark quickly but refuse to burn.
One of the best parts of human experience is sharing yourself with other people. It never really matters the capacity in which you do, but there is a satisfaction in walking out from an interaction knowing that a connection has been created, whether it is good like meeting a stranger on your first day in school and forming a lifelong bond of sisterhood, or awkward like being forced into a conversation with an old lady who is uncomfortably racist but also weirdly nice to you because you speak fluent English.
I miss home. Yet when my friends replied back to my overburdening complaints, a text back for every sentence, with proportionate amounts of pity for my health and anger towards the phone carrier; their words coming to wrap around me like a blanket, warming on a cold morning, and comforting, like a warm cup of tea, or a glass of whiskey at the end of a long work day; I am reminded that home is not always just a place.
At the beginning of the year, someone asked me what friendship meant to me. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to my response until now: a love that saves. A love that reminds you that you can go through anything because it is there to hold your hands through every crazy moment, no matter how inconvenient and uncomfortable. A love that stays on the other end of the phone for hours unending so you stop being scared and finally fall asleep. A love that endures through the long night and sustains you until the sun rises. A love that anchors you long enough, and when you are ready to fly, adds winds to your sails. A love that heals. A love that offers stability when everything else in your life is falling apart.
I’ve been reading Bell Hooks’ All About Love, and in the first chapter, she talks about love as an act and not just a feeling as we have come to know it; an intentional choice to care for, and “nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual growth.” By adopting Hook’s notion of love, the role that my friends play in my life becomes clearer by the day.
Home is a person, or a group of persons who wake up every day and choose you. Choose to love you. I hope that everyone can look around them and appreciate the love in their lives, whether it's from friends, family, or a romantic partner. Love is not some rare commodity that is only available to a select few.
I have spent most of the past week sharing excerpts from All About Love with my friends, and here are some of my favourites:
The search for love continues, even in the in the face of great odds.
Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.
Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving. Simple axioms that make self-love sound easy only make matters worse. It leaves many people wondering why, if it is so easy, they continue to be trapped by feelings of low self-esteem or self-hatred.
To be fully alive is to act….Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward spirit, an outward manifestation of an inward power. But as we act, we not only express what is in us and help give shape to the world; we also receive what is outside us, and reshape our inner selves.
And here is my favourite song of the week:
The fact that I put a picture and scene to every paragraph written... everything is relatable. This was a refreshing one.