Alix: Nothing matters but love—or Persian rugs.

One night last year I was heartbroken and awake at four in the morning. The internet said that was wrong. 

I was long past a reasonable time to be crying over something that ended months before (you can never cry over someone you had, but always and only over something you had). Something that had lasted only a few weeks anyway. There was a clear path out of my sadness, our collective 21st century wisdom screamed from the top of my Google results, and I had failed to stay on it. 

I knew there was—I had followed that path before. I knew how, and that, it worked. 

You mourn. If your relationship was serious, which essentially means long, you are allowed some time and understanding—you are the person going through a breakup, your heartache a tunnel of unspecified length from which you will, at the right moment, emerge. You lose your appetite, stare into the void, feel people’s sympathy for the only instance in which you are somewhat allowed to let a feeling (not a tragedy, not a death, just a feeling) take over your entire life. 
It is exhausting, and impossibly romantic. You feel the full extent of the love you are capable of. It’s awe inspiring and scary to the bones. You wonder if you’ll ever be whole again, and know the answer is yes and no both—you will be whole, but a whole, different person.   
You think. You overthink. You rationalize and hold onto platitudes such as that everything happens for a reason (or several)—then dissect that reason looking for all the reasons behind the reason and then you give up, get back to the main reason, and package it in a clear narrative that conveys to yourself and others that you know what went wrong. That you are a bigger, better person, a person who has learned. 
You may not totally believe that narrative yourself, until one day you realize you did get out on the other side. Different. Still, whole. You look back and it’s days, weeks, at some point months, since you thought about the person you once loved with the intensity that only loss can make you feel—an ache of the soul that hurts in your body. You forget their birthday. You see their name and photos of them on social media (the past’s favorite channel for haunting), and it’s almost sad how non-sad it makes you. 
Except none of this felt appropriate, or allowed, for a weeks-long love, forget about months after it left my life. I observe people around me bouncing back all the time—find new lovers, new flings, new exciting distractions. I was embarrassed that I couldn’t let go of something I should have been over in a twirl and a clap. I was being silly, unrealistic. Wasting time. 

The world doesn’t seem to have much tolerance of being unwise. Of wanting to throw yourself into something that shows all the signs of being a doomed experiment, guided by the stubborn quest for an exception. It educates you, the world, it warns you about the beguiling red-flag merchants you may choose to love (it is a choice, I believe, in the same way that it is a choice, made in a split second and yet still conscious, to stop fighting the urge to doze off). 
It might be that I come from a culture that has no expression for “red flag” but, it appears, I do have a tendency to choose the wrong people, and fall in love in the wrong way—never casual, never light, never tentative. Hardly easy come. Never easy go.

It’s Valentine’s Day next weekend—the tenth in a row that I find myself spending, as I recently have taken to say, half jokingly, “in between lovers.” Ten years—it’s a long time. I have loved a lot. I have been rejected. I have been unfair. I have had sweeping romances that vanished into thin air, and perfectly pleasant times with perfectly pleasant men. Someone I loved told me he loved me, and I believed it. I spent a lot of time alone, and most of it was good. 
 
I added a lot of material to my museum of relationships past—galleries of anecdotes and gossip of families I no longer hear about; libraries of memories there is no point sharing; full collections of preferences, pet peeves, old home addresses, cute childhood anecdotes of people I no longer frequent. The ever-expanding estate of the things that went wrong—that I did wrong. 

For a culture that often talks about embracing failure, we actually only like it when we can turn it into a form of success. A moment of growth, of learning, the step back to take a step forward. But sitting with our mistakes eludes us, still. Narratives about the things that just didn’t work out—not tragedies, or lessons, just bad times—are not especially sought after.

A friend of mine, who had been heartbroken after the end of brief relationship with a woman he had fallen for violently, saw her many months after she had left him. She knew she had behaved unfairly and misled him. So when they went for a drink, at one point she asked him why he had agreed to see her, and why was he warm to her—why wasn’t he angry? “Because I love you,” he replied. It was the least cool thing to say, an uncalculated reply that was not going to make her love him, or make him look more desirable—he knew it; he didn’t care.

When he told me the story I was reminded of my middle school Italian teacher—one of the most intelligent people I ever met—who on the last day of school, as a way of goodbye, told my class of 13-year-olds to “never be ashamed of telling someone that you love them."

I knew then—as I do now—it’s not easy advice: Somehow we learn so soon that love is a game you win by being loved, not by loving.

It is practical, and effective, to know there are rules and strategies. To know who to stay away from, and why, and what’s the right way to move on. It can, often does, lead to fulfillment—collective wisdom  is not built on nothing. It has worked for me when I have tried it.
And yet. Somewhere there must be space, as there’s so much human worth in it, to appreciate the bravery of telling someone that you love them irrespective of the fact they don’t deserve it. The intelligence of teaching that there’s never shame in love. The complexity of being up at night in tears, for all the wrong reasons—for the only right one.  

🎬 Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski was inspired to make his film, Cold War, by "a 40-year-long complicated, fascinating, never-ending disaster of a love affair": His parents's. "They were so incredibly mismatched as a couple, but they were also the most dramatically interesting characters I’ve ever known." 

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🔬 It is believed that Persian weavers deliberately make one tiny mistake while making a carpet. The so-called Persian Flaw is a humble reminder that god is perfect, while humans—they make mistakes.

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🎼 At the end of 2016, Patti Smith delivered an unforgettable performance of Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony. After about two minutes, she was overcome with emotion and had to stop, then start again. "I hadn’t forgotten the words that were now a part of me. I was simply unable to draw them out," she later wrote. It is a moving, profound moment of pure art.

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✒️ Wisława Szymborska, Writing a Curriculum Vitae (excerpt):

Regardless of how long your life is,
the Curriculum Vitae should be short.

Be concise, select facts.
Change landscapes into addresses
and vague memories into fixed dates.

Of all your loves, mention only the marital,
and of the children, only those who were born.

It's more important who knows you
than whom you know.
Travels––only if abroad.
Affiliations––to what, not why.
Awards––but not for what.

Write as if you never talked with yourself,
as if you looked at yourself from afar.

Omit dogs, cats, and birds,
mementos, friends, dreams.

State price rather than value,
title rather than content.
Shoe size, not where one is going,
the one you are supposed to be.

Enclose a photo with one ear showing.
What counts is its shape, not what it hears.

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🙏 Human and editor extraordinaire Sarah Todd once again made this email better. She also drew this issue's Alix bunny. Extraordinaire, what did I say. 

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