1. THE FIRST TIME YOU FELL IN LOVE
EBIE: Fall in Hong Kong — I was twenty years old, stumbling under green lights in downtown clubs and going on mediocre dates that I hated myself for afterwards. All my friends were on the other side of the world. Life was careless, aimless, jaded. When Alex slid next to me on that yacht and asked me how to play mahjong, I have to admit, love was far from my mind. But I found him interesting, overwhelming, impossible to look away from. It was his inquisitiveness, sarcasm, and how he, like me, was searching for a home in this city.
I could say I fell in love with him on the steps by the Victoria Harbor where we had our first kiss, or the following Sunday morning dim sum, or our sunset hike on Lantau Island. But love, stripped of sweeping gestures of romance, is different from what I had made it out to be. I felt it morph when we sat on the stairs outside his dorm, sleepless and hungry at 3 am, and he told me everything about his life that broke my heart and pieced it back together. I wrote a letter to him not long after, I’m scared. I’m scared I don’t know how to be in a relationship properly. I’m scared because I finally love my life and I really, really like you.
So it turns out falling in love is no trivial thing. It is a lot more like falling into a choice — to be responsible for someone, let them be responsible for you, and feel your lives change into something at once unrecognizable and closer to who they’re meant to be. We’re in over a year now — and I’m holding our love ever so near.
2. THE LAST TIME YOU BROKE A HEART
KAI-LIN: Last September, and it was mine. Breaking your own heart is bad, miserable, humiliating business. The only perk, really, is that you’re in the driver seat of your own unhappiness. You get to decide, on a scale of Ongoingly Bad to I’m Never Leaving My Bedroom Again, where every night is going to land. You get to walk around town with your shoulders pulled up to your ears in shame and drag your heartbreak around behind you like a carcass, grossing everybody out and evoking in you even more shame, which at some point starts to feel pleasurable. You get to pick up bad habits with newfound courageousness, things like stress-smoking and masturbating to studio production porn every night, even though you’re completely dry down there and your eyes are glazing over in the dark. You’re not thinking of him, you’re thinking of the tiny girl in the video screaming on mute, wondering where she goes to buy her coffee and what TV shows she likes to watch in bed. It makes you feel less lonely.
All this self-imposed suffering had little to do with the summer fling who had flung me to and from New York in tears both ways, and everything to do with the prospect of never escaping my history of desiring the wrong people. If I could just be more like Ebie, I thought, listening to her gush to me over the phone about a boy she’d met on a yacht, how she really liked this one. My best friend, the most beautiful girl in the world, rewarded at every turn by the universe for her ability to always, always choose correctly. I loved her too much to feel envious, and I knew myself too well to feel it was unfair. Had I been on that yacht with her, I knew I’d look right past the nice ones, with their tanned bodies and easygoing smiles, their noble hearts and good intentions. I’d have found myself trouble—long-haired, mercurial, a poet or photographer or something—and jumped overboard with him into the water. My nature, my pathology, my preference: Knowing this about myself with bone-deep surety made me want to never touch another person again. Certainly, it broke my heart.
3. THE MOST ROMANTIC PLACE ON EARTH
EB: Rainy Sundays Book Club (RSBC), consisting of just two — Kelly and me — your dearest writers. We started RSBC informally before our junior year of college, a stressful and pivotal time of our lives. I’d always tug my flimsy art tote bag, containing a laptop, some grocery item that Kelly didn’t have, my journal, wallet, keys, and walk twenty minutes from my apartment to hers on the other side of West Campus. We could always count on each other to cheer us up, no matter the day.
One Sunday, it rained, and I arrived in her living room, soaked, sweaty, about to collapse. And collapse I did — I don’t remember where — either on her bed or on her floor, though I still remember the coarse touch of her room’s carpet so well.
We were always hungry when we saw each other. We’d share what we’d eaten that day, and collectively, it would be like, an iced coffee from Lucky Lab, an apple, four strawberries. She’d promptly revived us by her glass tea pot with floating herbs and her grandma’s hand-wrapped wontons that never seemed to run out. I’d sit cross-legged on her wooden kitchen table, talking incessantly as she stirred the pot, the aroma of seaweed and broth filling the air. Faint music would be playing from her laptop, too. That Fall, we listened to a lot of babygirl’s you were in my dream last night (the acoustic version, if we were sad).
I think we termed our Sunday hangout RSBC, not because we read all that much during it — we would be studying or gossiping — but because we liked the sound of it. It cheered us up.
That apartment doesn’t exist anymore. It got bulldozed over the next summer, in typical West Campus fashion. I also don’t remember the last time one of us mentioned RSBC — but no matter. Today, the most romantic place on earth is Sunday in her kitchen in San Francisco, where she boils more water for us without a word, and Amora purrs happily in my lap (I know she misses me). It’s Sunday at my home in D.C., when I time the kettle to go off at the same time as she arrives to spend the week with me.
4. THE MOST IMPORTANT ‘I LOVE YOU’
KL: Amelia coming over to help me push thumbtacks into the fresh drywall; Lisette standing over her kitchen stove explaining how she adds spaghetti to a pot so the noodles cook evenly; Abby asking me to read a few lines of poetry out loud in her loft; Lillie helping me pick out fabrics and sashes at Michaels for my senior overalls; Daniela showing me how to give head with a straight face; Emma taking us to the woods outside her house and asking Christine to take a photo of me and her, before proceeding to kiss me. Though we seldom said the word ‘love’ to each other, I’ll never forget that it was the girls in my life who made me first feel worthy of it. Young affection is not so different from the motions of romance: we slept in each other’s arms and woke cheek-to-cheek like lovers; we fought for each other’s attention at school, as jealous of each other as we were desiring and admiring; we dreamt of a future together, made plans to always keep the line open, the door ajar. Daniela used to scribble wedding bands around my and her ring finger during Biology. Ebie and I used to take trips to SoCal and twirl around hand-in-hand along the beach.
My love for the women in my life feels like gravity, drawing me closer to some central mystery of the universe. Obviously, the nature of how we love one another changes necessarily with age, but I can never thank them enough for what they did for me in my formative years, for the depth of meaning they continue to color my days with. Their tempers and whims, their brave faces and secret softness, and their unbridled longing, too; for cityscapes, for creative pursuits, for men, for prestige or freedom or a pair of Miu Miu heels; I can’t help but feel like I am sitting on the live wire of life when I love and am loved by my female friends.
5. THE BEST ADVICE FOR A BROKEN HEART
I don't have any advice, because you won't be the same again. You'll be new and different, having known that kind of love. You'll look and hope for that same thing again. You won't find it. You will find something new and different-it doesn't have to be romantic love at all, but it will change you yet again. If and when you lose that too, you'll be new and different again, until you find with all this change that there was an essential part of you that is always you, and that part is imperishable. — advice from a girl on tumblr
EB: When I was heartbroken two years ago, Kelly sent me this quote. I’ve kept it engrained in the palm of my hand, and it has been tried and true. In heartbreak, it was tempting to close myself off romantically, even more tempting to deem myself “emotionally unavailable,” thinking that anything bad and hurtful that happens will leave me unscathed, not unlike the act of watching a distant character on a movie screen. Emotional unavailability is like burying alive the imperishable part of you which loves and longs to be love. To crawl out of it, I poured into my love for Sunday newsletters, cozy apartments, creative writing classes, and friends who have a way of lightening my heart. Even in the absence of romantic love, I saw a love that was pure and whole, budding in the soft soil of a quiet morning, resilient to the harshest of nights.
6. THE WORST SYMPTOM(S) OF DESIRE
KL: Desire makes you unscrupulous. Compulsive. It wages chemical warfare against your body and microwaves your brain cells. It bakes you like a cake. It lands you in hot water with your friends, who can all see you’ve become a walking zombie. It’s embarrassing. And it doesn’t last. The worst symptom of all, though, is that it changes you: in ways that will leave you stranded from yourself for years after all is said and done. I used to know a thing or two about who I was, before somebody touched my leg for the first time in a parked car under the shaded oak behind my high school—and then I didn’t know anything at all. I thought I knew something about who I became after that, before somebody else bludgeoned my heart against the curb of a college lawn party—and then I was freshly unrecognizable to myself yet again.
Is being changed a good thing? I don’t know. I am both better and worse for loving as I have loved, for desiring as I have desired. To know I have that time-blurring, space-defying capacity for all-consuming devotion inside me is a gift in and of itself: so much of what it means to be human gathers at the vertices of love and desire. But I am rocked with grief, too, at the memory of all these lit-up moments, when every second felt so pivotal and every touch seemed to beckon a hopeful future into existence. Desire is interesting, because you feel the animal kick of want before you even know what it is you’re wanting for. To be loved? To feel good? To set up house in the suburbs or reenact every dark fantasy you’ve ever had on a beautiful body? Truths of wants and needs reveal themselves only in the aftermath of desire realized. And it’s the truth that carries us forward.
7. ANYBODY YOU MISS TONIGHT?
EB: The people I loved in childhood, who left behind a blueprint for a lifetime of loneliness. You could trace it back to when we were five and ran off to play hide and seek at the grocery store. Then, we were ten, riding the subway together from school. Somewhere, we're still watching pirated movies in bed, moments before our parents came home. And there we are again, teenage girls, backpacks heavy with novels, interlocking arms at an empty city crossroad. That is all before one of us moves away, gets a boyfriend or a time-demanding job, leaves a message unread, a post unopened, however our lives diverge.
Really, it’s no one’s fault. Distance is cruel. Most of the people I love today are in another city. It’s different now than those from childhood, of course — better that it’s not frozen with a nostalgia for the past. We’ve gotten better at seeing each other monthly, and I’ve learned to see time as nonlinear. In my mind, I’m blending the past and future into Siken’s gold room where everyone gets what they want and we’re together and never leave.
Often, the antidote to missing someone is patience. But I can’t help my fragility — sometimes, I feel pangs of loneliness and retreat from new conversations that fall short of closeness, of the magic I’ve felt before. Olivia Laing puts it well, it feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. I wander my days knowing I’ve been there — I’ve tasted the goodness of a deep connection. And I’m hopeful it’ll come again and again. I search for the people I love in everyone I meet.
8. WHO YOU SHOULD SPEND VALENTINE’S DAY WITH
KL: Whoever makes you believe again in the mystery and mystique of love, I think. Romance sits on no bedrock of sensibility. From a life update last March, a few weeks shy of officially ‘meeting’ my girlfriend for the first time:
anytime i describe beautiful or good things, i notice that i use overtly sour language: i am always crashing into something, something is always splintering me apart, there is always a bruise or a clot or i’m just straight up dying, i am being killed slowly, i am seized by uncontrollable forces and descending like a fallen angel from someplace pure and cold into someplace viler, baser, more dangerous. the things i feel have a perilous momentum to them.
The business of loving and being loved is arguably sour. The churning of hearts in this great blue machine of discontent brings out a strange ache in us all—we sit alone by the windowsill in a city of one million other windowsills, one vivacious thing among the vivacious many, all of us starving for the right sort of attention. We gaze at and through each other over dinner tables in the dying light, touch without feeling, feel without trusting. I choose to forgive what past lovers did to me, whether in moments of incredible tenderness or cruelty, just as I hope they might someday forgive me. To be so young, so hopeful, so arrogant, so devoted, so hurt. That is the only way we can ever learn anything about love: by moving through it and enduring its sourness, so as to experience its accompanying richness.
By the time Ava nudged her way into my life, I had forgotten this essential secret of love. Years of choosing incorrectly—I thought—had corroded my sense of wonder in people and turned me into a non-believer of romance. Haughtily, I decided to believe in bigger things than romance: friends, for example, or the emotional gold rush of renting a studio in Manhattan after graduating. I put away my sad little diary entries and chose to have faith in Orseund Iris instead; I looked to gel manicures for peace, Turkish scarves for comfort. I grew resigned to the touch-and-go of things, a prickly girl wrapped up in her coats and bags and books, stockpiling big beautiful things to perhaps compensate for an uninhabited heart. But tell me, how can anything be bigger than an expanse of sky you’re watching with her? Lying on our backs somewhere in west Texas, summer nipping at our heels, and desperately turning out my pockets for more time, for any extra second with her before we slipped out of each other’s zip codes forever; and how the stars came out for us that night after a week of drizzle, how we stumbled the whole way down in the dark, too busy straining our necks back trying to count the pinpricks of light. Miles away from the closest streetlight, we couldn’t make out a single thing in front of us, but I saw her. I really saw her.
I swear, no beautiful thing has ever outshone a soul in love.
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Wow. i mean wow. this was such a pleasure to read. it felt like a vast expanse of fresh beautiful fruits - the overwhelming brightness of something you cannot wait to sink your teeth into. i loved this, fell into it completely. you guys are amazing!!!!!
love a hong kong love story (of course it begins on a boat) - and really awesome to see another hk writer on here! let’s connect sometime ebie