I love you
TEXT RACHEL CARLSON, DANA KURNIAWAN
DESIGN MICHELLE SONG
ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES
LIT
dead bird,
07
I have never owned a cat, but my childhood neighbors had a particularly active one named Fuki. As a kitten, he would deposit dead birds in our backyard or on our porch—right at the foot of the door, so it was the first thing we’d see when we went outside. It was usually a clean job, but sometimes there’d be a trail of dripping blood left on the porch and traces of dried blood in his whiskers and on his black and white paws. He was breathless, victorious, and proud, always oblivious to the repulsion that would ensue. Even then, I felt ashamed of my own disgust—I recognized that the birds were his gift, as if to say, “Look how much I love you!” I wondered if he realized that he became an animal instead of a pet in those moments, and if he could ever understand the reaction his welcome-mat murder scenes received, whether he might be a little embarrassed. When I think about him now, I’m reminded of Julia Kristeva’s Approaching Abjection. The essay explores what it means to exist outside of the symbolic, or rather, outside a realm in which language can make distinctions between self and other. Her term “abjection” loosely refers to our response to this breakdown between everything I deem to represent myself and everything I reject—a phenomenon which “indicates to me what I keep permanently at a distance in order to live.” She references the idea of seeing a corpse: the way it reminds us of the limits of our constructed boundaries, “death infesting life.” +++ I think I will always be in love with you, you said at the beginning of August. The first time I heard any combination of those words directed to me in real life, inviting déjà vu for something I’d only imagined. We were sitting behind the tennis courts in that park near my house. You told me you had cried recently. I was yanking blades of brown grass up from the mud by their roots, weaving them one at a time through the laces of my shoes. I knew you never cried, which I always thought was funny, and that a few minutes ago, my stomach had started feeling like the grass stains on my shoelaces. I still asked you why, because I wanted to confirm I was wrong. It could have been that some part of me wanted to hear the words that came next. Maybe part of me needed to make you say them. That you regretted how you’d treated me. That you hadn’t realized it was wrong at the time. That you were sorry, and that you had been thinking about us a lot. That you had had these realizations while getting high. With the final confession, I wondered if the apology actually counted and if drugs made people more thoughtful. I wondered if that’s where the term guilt-trip comes from or if I was the one who’d gotten high and was still imagining the entire conversation. I had no idea how to hold these possibilities. We had barely spoken in over a year, and I was pretty sure you didn’t believe in love, since you reminded me so often that the words love or relationship don’t mean anything at all. A little less than two years ago, you and I had spent the day at a bookstore in Downtown LA, where we had watched from behind a stack on the second floor a man publicly propose to his girlfriend on a couch on the first. A few hours later, I found myself choking out the words I think I have feelings for you as you told me I looked like I was about to pass out. We ended up sitting cross-legged on that very same panopticonic couch in the center of rows of books on that first floor as we attempted to work out the details of our new “togetherness.” All I remember is hearing us fall into a book metaphor, something about this part of our relationship being a sequel and having multiple volumes, with writers who couldn’t stop making typos and editors who never caught them. Back in the park two years later, I dug my fingernails into my thigh, remembering our conversation as I drove you home from the bookstore––how deep I’d had to dig to make myself laugh when you said you were still taking this really hot girl in your class to prom instead of me. Just to see what it was like. +++
I am trying to love urgently, and I love you, one of my closest and longest-held friends said to me when I picked up the phone. She then confessed that she was worried she had told her boyfriend she loved him too soon. That she had deflated the words by saying them out loud. She started crying, but I was kind of impressed. She has always known how to tell people exactly what she thinks, when she thinks it. Meanwhile, even asking for a library book I wanted to read took weeks of practice in elementary school—maintaining a steady voice, eye contact, and the confidence to say that I needed something. I love you’s were even harder than things like no and I don’t want to, which required years of practicing assertion in my grandma’s living room. All the words were bulky coming out of my mouth, bones lodging themselves in the back of my throat. Everything was always somehow too much and not enough—the almost-right-but-not-quite translation of a thing that doesn’t have one. +++ A few years ago at a UCLA art exhibit, I saw the words Language is sexy. Words are precise and sexy written in white on a black wall. I thought you’d like them too, but you weren’t talking to me at the time. I still think about these words a lot, and how conflicted they made me feel—words might be sexy, but they rarely feel precise. If words aren’t precise, then what can be said about language? Now, the image mostly reminds me of a dining-hall conversation I had with two friends last spring. A professor of German romance novels had once said to them, romance and seduction lie in the space between what we say and what we mean. That Sunday, in the park, part of me thought you had said exactly what you meant. It wasn’t what I was used to. Snippets of that six-hour conversation outside a coffee shop crawl into my mind every so often. Maybe you remember how we had planned to discuss our relationship itself, but ended up going nowhere near it. Sometimes, the space between what is said and what is meant is not seductive at all. Once you had asked, Does anyone know we hook up sometimes? I had responded, a few friends. What I had wanted to say was, I’m sorry if I embarrass you. Maybe your refusal to hold my hand or put your arm around me in public should have told me everything. We didn’t just know what the other person wanted to say, and the notion that we did only fed the fantasy of complete mutual understanding without communication. That Sunday, though, I wished I had asked why you got to break the rules of the “relationship” two years too late, when your voice in my head is still so good at talking me out of saying what I mean. Still reminds me that phrases like I love you are also questions. Do you love me, too? +++ After my friend described her I love you, she asked if I had ever said it myself. I remembered sitting in the mud behind the tennis courts and how I stopped breathing a little when I heard the words for the first time. I thought I might have been in love with someone else at the time, but I knew as soon as you and I left the park that I should not tell this other person. Even the thought of saying the words out loud seemed more like a question of whether they could expose everything I needed them to, and whether or not I was allowed to have those feelings in the first place. I started seeing someone, he texted me in November. Anyway, hope you’re doing well. I wanted to respond, but it hurt a little more each time I started typing. The text hadn’t left very much room for emotion, anyway. I tried, thank you for telling me and stopped thinking how the first letter he wrote me has spent the
