#3: Again, again, kiss me again.

A special Valentine's Day edition!

💌 Surprise!

We’re not due for another letter until Sunday, but as water signs and romantics, passing up on a Valentine’s Day edition of My Brilliant Friend...wasn’t going to happen.

We asked you some questions about love last week, and you answered. This letter is from us to you, from you to us, and dedicated to anyone out there looking lovelorn by the window tomorrow.

— Ebie & Kelly

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K: Describe your last best kiss.

At a traffic light. If I had known it would be our last, I would’ve stopped traffic forever.
First and last kiss are always at the airport and feel so different. Long-distance is tough.
Kissing my boyfriend before we had to part ways and live in different states again.
A kiss at the bus station before we returned to long distance.
A goodbye kiss with a non-boyfriend on their parents’ driveway while we were barefoot.
It’s been too long.

My anthropology professor made a throwaway comment the other day in class about the “rituals of termination and abandonment.” He was referring to what archaeologists often discover in the ruins of civilian houses—these configurations of material that suggest a family had intentionally left things behind before migrating elsewhere. Some such configurations resemble shrines, meant to express gratitude for the house spirit and entice it into following them to their next abode. Other configurations are more pragmatic—objects too cumbersome, too heavy, or too fragile for the road find themselves left to the wayside.

You could argue that the last kiss, ever-dreaded and ever-savored, is a ritual of abandonment, too. Not so novel as the first kiss, not so casual as the hundreds peppering the in-between—no, this kiss speaks to a moment we are all of us trying to overcome before it comes over us. Maybe if I hold up the green light, you’ll return to me sooner. Maybe if I push my hands into your hair and show the faces in the windows how much it hurts, the bus will wait a little longer. Maybe if we embrace right under where the garage door goes down, it never will—and I’ll have the chance to whisper, Again, again, kiss me again.

E: Do you regret your first kiss?

73% — no.
23% — yes.

Valentine’s Day, 2018. We were behind a rundown church when you leaned in and I ran off. You wanted me, I wanted my first kiss to be sacred—in a say you’ll love me forever at the altar type of way.

Friday night in a Starbucks parking lot, months later. Our space in the backseat of your car, your face inches from mine and me laughing through my braces. Was it a curse that you missed and landed in the hair blanketing my neck, that I tried for weeks after to make it feel good?

If you say no, I won't believe you (but I hope you do).

K: Compare love to a season.

Love is the winter when you’re in the middle of a Texas summer. Feels like it will never come.
Love is the transition days between winter and spring. New beginnings, allergies :(, rebirth.
Always and forever spring. I don’t care that it’s cliche.
Mmmm. It’s early summertime when there’s lots of sunshine and the afternoon never ends.
Love is a summer night. Sweaty, intoxicating, and fluorescent—always remembered fondly.
Always autumn. (Specifically, October, when the leaves are falling and the night sparkles.)

Camille sighed wistfully and said, “I miss the rain already. When will it rain again?”

I thought with real grief, Not fucking soon, I hope. That sums the two of us up. I’m trying to make my way downstairs in the morning without slipping on ice and landing on my ass, swearing like a sailor. But she’s braving inclement weather for the late-night vibe check. This is something we haven’t found a ton of common ground on. She doesn’t understand why I like a summer day so hot you could fry eggs on the sidewalk (the escape), and I don’t understand her rabbit-pulse need to go on below-freezing walks (the lucidity).

Like most other things, our preferences for heat stroke or wind chill are molded by experience. I’ve never been kissed Taylor-Swift-style in the rain, but I have had all my great loves between the peak of June and the trough of August. And in the theater of the heart and mind, love has the power to transform something as fickle as the seasons into permanent landmarks of sorrow or joy. What was the temperature outside when you fell to the floor in tears or kissed somebody for the first time sitting shotgun? We all know the answer to those questions.

E: What’s the color of your love?

moonlight
a warm, grey purple
lemon yellow
mint blue
dark, organ red
deep forest green

Mine is a sunlit blue. Refractive where sky meets land, and how I meet you.

I’m thinking about how it’s almost impossible for me to stop loving someone, or, as they now say, burn bridges. Intuiting a friend grown distant, a goodbye text, a newly hidden location on Find My Friends—I hold onto you with every lightness of my being. I once heard the saying, the opposite of love is indifference, dully unaware of why I still write about you from time to time.

They say blue is the rarest color in nature, but doesn’t the endless sky make up for it? Too much of my energy, I swear, is spent longing for empty matter, existing as briefly as a cloud of thin air. Years ago, I wrote this in an early morning— “I dreamed of you for the first time since forever. It felt so real—your smile, your curls, and I was so happy ... I realize I don’t know who you are anymore, and you don’t know who I am. What has happened since we last talked? I want to know … if I will choose you again.”

In spectra, the color of love is flesh red on your cheeks after I kiss your nose in winter, the same glimmer of moonlight as you are in Asia and I am here, the cool brevity of call me when you’re home, and of you said I killed you—haunt me then.

K: Heartbreak on the interstate. What are you listening to?

Here’s a tracklist curated from your answers:

1. Bad Religion - Frank Ocean | 2. Lately - Wet | 3. Movie - Tom Misch | 4. BASQUIAT - Jamila Woods ft. Saba | 5. Liability - Lorde | 6. What Could Have Been - Sting ft. Ray Chen | 7. I’m Not a Mountain - Sarah Kinsley | 8. In The Shadows - Foreign Air | 9. C’est la vie - Weathers | 10. Hit ‘Em Up Style (Oops!) - Blu Cantrell

You can listen here. We’ve also got our usual what we’re listening to playlist for you, updated this week to reflect new and all-time favorite love songs.

E: What was a formative on-screen romance?

Elizabeth & Darcy (Pride & Prejudice 2005), Princess Anne & Joe Bradley (Roman Holiday), Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone (Spider-Man), Sutter & Aimee (The Spectacular Now)

I am always drawn to leads who don’t end up together. In 《那些年我们一起追过的女孩》 (the girls we chased in those years), you follow a love that’s pure and simple and light, trailblazing through the ruins of growing up. A little like working on homework problems together well into nightfall; a lot like the blinding uncertainty of a high school relationship.

I suppose it’s easy to be numb in the face of melodramatic happy endings after a million and more of the opposite. But I confess—when Elizabeth kisses Darcy’s hand in the golden field where he pronounces his great love, there is a tiny part of me that wishes for it, too.

Marceline & Princess Bubblegum (Adventure Time), Musa and Riven (Winx Club), Princess Liana & Alexa (Barbie & the Diamond Castle)

Because, duh.

K: Send a message in a bottle to your soulmate.

Hurry up!
I hope both our dreams will come true.
It’s you and I’ve always loved you.
Reveal yourself.
I hope we sing and dance together all the time.

Who are you? Where are you right now? What will you do to me? I put everything into the knife of that first, infinite encounter: my joy and my vanity, my fear and my pride, the axis of desire on which my life spins. But mostly, I think about what I’ll say and what you’ll say. You and the English language are the two great loves of my life. I compose and decompose future first sentences in my head, trying to make these both get along, to catch the moment before it catches me.

It is ultimately a disappointing process. My hope is not very realistic, but I wish we could just cut to the chase—skip the get-to-know-you’s and go straight to the moment on the balcony: Juliet, bowed like a flower over the edge of ruin with gentle hand pressed to heart, saying to Romeo below, “My ears have not yet drunk a hundred words / Of that tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound.” Here, she may be referring to the literal sound of his voice, having spoken to him at the party—but I believe she is also saying, I know the sound of you, as I have imagined it a hundred times, and it has visited me so often in dreams that now you, stranger-lover-enemy, already feel like a memory.

E: Last time you were in love?

Right now, 2 weeks ago, Summer 2021 - lamp light illuminating brown paper as I wrote to them, Never, November, Past life, Maybe right now, Never in love, but love is in me - Guess it’ll come out when it wants to.

Love, I think, is far simpler than we make it out to be. I am in love with long coats, wool scarves that wrap around your neck exactly twice, the in-between of snow and rain, candlelight in windowless rooms, baby pink raincoats, the way you asked me to repeat my name to make sure you got it right, an empty subway, our warm corner in the bar, the wrinkle under your eyes when you smile, candy in the shape of hearts... Why reserve being in love to the rarest of affairs, subject to the dilution of time and the dreadful question of reciprocity? It is a choice, and I will choose it in this life and always.

K: What did the poets get wrong?

Love can be grown over time, and the best love is. (Like in arranged marriages.)
Love is not all about you(rself).
That love is supposed to be hard, that you’re supposed to fight because it means it’s worth it. WRONG. That just means your relationship is toxic. Love is easy.
Romantic relationships won’t heal your inner child, only you can.
There’s no such thing as a soulmate, just people who choose each other.

Love is easy. This is what we’re all realizing, like a veil lifted from our hearts, as we grow older and the party tricks lose their shine. I reread my old pieces of writing about love and feel far from the girl who described it as “that wretch [which] has made a menagerie of my heart and urged me nightly to push the knife in deeper” (early 2019). In the throes of “love,” I had once confided to my journal: “I can’t sleep. My chest hurts. I feel on fire with yearning, then I feel shame for feeling at all. Every smile I’ve sent your way, I sacrificed something for it…” (early 2019). It’s true, I love theatrics. But now I speak of these things much more plainly. I say, “Some mornings I hardly remember [my name] without your telling it to me between gasps of laughter” (Christmas 2021).

Maybe that’s why I’ve started to come around to Valentine’s Day again. Camille said to Sandra and me in a bar last Friday, “I’m in love right now,” and she meant with us: the three of us, then and there, with our shiny earrings and watered-down cocktails, our empty sides of the bed, our hurt feelings, and all the things we tenderly compared love to that night, speaking long and lovely circles around it, for a lack of any better way to explain the unexplainable: Love is a lightness. Love is a choice. Love is to be known. Love is… On and on it went.

Let me tell you, dear reader. My chest did not burn. No sharp object broke my skin. And as I walked home—frozen wind, deserted street, black noir scene of a thousand sadnesses—I realized something very peculiar, something I didn’t dare say aloud, though nobody could have heard me: I’m in love right now, too.

E: What did the poets get right?

“Love is a contraband in hell.” (Assata Shakur)
“From all the offspring of heaven and earth, love is the most precious.”
That the right person, wrong time hurts the most.
“That our veins are absolutely strings tied to other people's kites.” (Andrea Gibson)

Right person, wrong time, I tell myself while I am in absolute shreds waiting for them to mature, to move a few cities closer, to stop losing their phone at music festivals, to go to graduate school with me... Do you ever wonder how much the cosmos has to align for two people to be together? It’s scary. And I would say it makes finding one great love all the more special, but I am not there yet.

When I was 17, I broke up with a boy for some and more of the above reasons, and I forgot how much it hurt until I dug up the trenches of my notes app: “I’d go through everything in a hundred thousand million times if it means I end up with you ... Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I’m laughing with my friends, and for a split second, everything is okay. But then I remember—and it hits harder than before—because I had a glimpse of what life was without you in it.”

There are not a lot of antidotes to heartbreak in circumstantial hell. But I do think of when Lang Leav said, “How many years must we put between us to prove we are no longer in love?” and “Love is the only thing time cannot touch.”

When Ocean Vuong said, “I miss you more than I remember you.”

When Sarah Kay said, “Love arrives exactly when love is supposed to, and love leaves exactly when it must. When love arrives say, ‘Welcome, make yourself comfortable.’ If love leaves, ask her to leave the door opened behind her. Turn off the music. Listen to the quiet. Whisper, ‘Thank you for stopping by.’”