practice love until you become it
I’ve always been a little preoccupied by love and the heat and humidity of a Maryland summer. I’ve lived through a summer fling or five, and when they accidentally boil into love, or God forbid, October, they are doing the very thing we hate about humidity — that cling-to-the-chest, hard-to-breathe, will-it-ever-end feeling.
Death, another preoccupation of mine, has everything to do with love. We love one another and in turn, face loss. If we are talking in bell hooks terms, “the practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside of our control.”
I had this idea, for a long time, that love is a glass-half-empty endeavor, like they're always going to leave, so it's always a little miserable. Sometimes I write an instagram caption that sticks in my mind like a song from the Annie soundtrack. On February 12 of this year, I wrote, “I love love, may we practice it and eventually become it.” A phrase that’s morphed in my mind into, “practice love until you become it.”
This phrase sums up those two pesky preoccupations — love and death. At first, I thought I meant, pretty simply, we die and we become love, OR we die and we become grief, which is love, OR we die and we are memories to the people who love us, which is love.
The more I consider this earworm of my own creation, I think about practice. Practice? Not the game, practice? But we aren’t talking about basketball, we are talking about love. We practice love like we practice forgiveness and solidarity and radical truth telling, all these values I hold so dear. I’ll never reach the point of perfecting any of them — there will be slip-ups and gray areas and struggle. That’s why values are something we practice and never perfect.
My stupid tattoo reminds me everyday of a word: "again." Again is a radical word, it's a compassionate word, it's a badass word. Choosing to do things, like love, takes a lot of courage. Choosing to do things again? That's determination and dedication. That’s practice. I got the tattoo in memory of my dear brother, but it's also in memory of all the times I decided to try again and in acknowledgement of all the times that I will try again in the future. It reminds me that life is made worthwhile through love. It reminds me that Chad lived a worthwhile life and is remembered for being a ridiculously loving person, someone who loved without conditions, even when the world was putting conditions on how much it would love him back.
Today will be the hottest day on record in the D.C. region, or that’s what the weather forecast is predicting. A long, hot Maryland summer — the humidity sticking to me, sweat dripping down my back. In the grocery store yesterday, in the tampon aisle, a woman approached me and said, “your tag is sticking out’ and gently pushed the tag back where it belongs. I never saw her face, I just watched her walk away. A simple gesture that reminded me that love lives everywhere, even in the tampon aisle, across from the chips, on the hottest day of the year, until today, which’ll probably beat it.