The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; The Met Collection.
All love, even the good kind, has base notes of anger or pity.
Pity when you feel on some level that you’re better than the other person — you’re less exhaustible, more charming and extroverted. Maybe you read more, find it easier to manipulate numbers and debug code, win debates handily, wear fashionable clothes. You run faster, climb higher. By dint of your low instinct for self-preservation, your inability to say no, you have more adventures. You do a million fucking things. You act, you sing. On a Monday night when the God-fearing are ensconced in their ugly houses safe upon the solid rock, you’re still dancing in the queer club downtown, the one with the 30-foot Anne Frank mural inexplicably painted on the side.
But there they are standing on the higher ground. They’re loyal and steadfast, and you’re the bad guy. Too dynamic, too capricious, needing constant defusing. You’re standing in the kitchen during the Moviepass days and they have this nice idea to go to the theater every Friday and you explode Is that what our life is going to be is it going to be that fucking domestic. You’re terminally bored. You have a backpack under your bed with all the shit a hundred dollars could buy you from a sex shop in St. Louis and they’re not that kinky. You’re the one who calls an hour later than you said you would, the one who wants to stay at the party after they’re ready to go home, the one who is conscious every time you sail into the night you’re leaving someone waving on the shore.
They fall asleep more easily than you. You could stare at their closed eyes, long lashes, cherub cheeks forever. Does everyone look so beatific when they’re dreaming? It makes you want to protect them with everything you have. But then they’re calling you after something bad has happened to talk it through and you look at your watch in the backseat of a car and decide you’ll go in, oh, six minutes. You’re itching to get back to the present. The present is always so insistent. Your laughing friends and the joint going around. Hey is it OK if I call you back — ? You ask for permission knowing full well they’ll never refuse.
Sometimes they say later I felt a bit sad when and you say sorry, you say sorry so eloquently and so much. You live inside an apology. You won’t do anything differently, not really. You hope your words, you’re always good with those, can exculpate you, you sprinkle kindnesses the way deadbeat dads give gifts. You send a handwritten card after ignoring their texts. You feel so guilty but they aren’t leaving, are they? You don’t like to confront your power because it makes you feel like a bad person. Once you even say I don’t want to have that kind of power over you. But you know they have to make do with the little you give because it would be worse to live without you.
Anger when you feel you’re a little less. That they feel an ease you don’t, they lean on you and everyone else the way you lean on a branch that won’t break. You resent the leaning, it looks like entitlement. You resent how the entitlement has never cost them anything, has maybe bought them more love from others than your standing upright has. With their words they throw this net of familiarity around the whole world: my boy X, my girl Y. They walk into other people’s houses with their shoes on. Their friends roll up to the yard uninvited, kiss them on the cheek, slap them on the ass with a tea-towel from the kitchen. The world is entitled to them too. You hesitated for so long just to embrace them, wondering if it would be an imposition.
You’re always trying so hard to get out of the way. You do invisible things, unloading the dishwasher and wiping the dust off the TV and cleaning their glasses. Slicing fruit and putting it on a plate so they eat something after a long day. You listen to their music and read the books they tell you to read and look up the names of the people they mention, pretend you knew them all along. You spend ridiculous sums on clothes. You wear long sleeves to hide the tattoos on your wrist that their mom won’t like. A sweater from the brand recommended by the friend they fell in love with before you. When they say your new outfit looks odd it breaks your heart.
You don’t blame them to their face. You say evenly I felt a bit sad when, see the I-statement instead of the you statement. A bit. Really it was horrible, really you were crying in the street and you cry now without tears, just feel tectonic plates moving in your throat. You ignore them for a day. Your way of protecting yourself, the way a hard-shelled creature retreats within. You tell them how you feel with a long message you edit before you send, and when they say If it feels that bad have you thought about walking away you get scared and say I didn’t mean it.
Sometimes you realize they need you so much, maybe more even than you need them, that if you’re bent down in tabletop position to let them sit on your back they’re the one who’s going to fall if you stand up.
Of course Pity needs the other person. You need their goodness, solidity, their anchor in the waves. You hate your friends sometimes and your coworkers are terrible or you’re failing your classes and you know the other person will understand, be a listening ear for thirty minutes, an hour, however long it takes. A warm hug at the end of the day, the charging station you go to after the crowd gets the best of you. Does anyone really love me? you think sometimes. This person does, they really do, and the dopey look they get looking at you makes you think maybe you could too.
Anger needs the other person too, their ambition and their beauty. You like being with someone who you’re competing with a little even when you know you’re not going to win the race. If they’re going out you’re going out. You slog through dense tomes wanting to know something they don’t. For a story to tell you spit saltwater into a gutter under the setting sun during a Japanese butoh workshop. You see cities at night with them and you feel like you’re high because of the glimmer on things. Sometimes there’s a meanness to them that makes you desirous. They criticize easily, eloquently. You want to touch the knife’s edge and be unbled.
Maybe you’re both, Janus-faced. In the long years when you kept on wanting more people than you were supposed to, you sang in the shower a Rostam song that went, Two boys, one to love you sweetly / One does so discreetly. Later you saw Rostam’s annotation on the lyrics: the two boys weren’t two boys at all but two versions of the same person. Which one you are is a question of time not essences. Today Anger and tomorrow Pity. You want to cast off victimhood and villainy alike. If you did enough honest work could you? Is there hierarchy in this scene? — it’s pouring rain in October and you’re both inadequately dressed, heads bowed under one umbrella, shoes sloshing through the miniature river on the asphalt. In a way you didn’t expect to yet, you start letting the rhymes in your head go tripping off your lips, an off-kilter Ashes, ashes —
A note: Today’s title is borrowed from the book by Eva Illouz. The subtitle of that text is “A Sociological Explanation,” which this decidedly is not.
As promised, this has been a limited-run project! This is my last post for at least a month. After taking a long spring break, I plan to start again - possibly experimenting with a different format! Thanks for subscribing 💕