“I love you. I’m glad I exist”

But when I remember this silly—and caring—moment years later, I realize we’re often taught that friendships aren’t allowed to have any moments that could be interpreted as romantic. In turn, we’re robbed of a million ways to love our friends.

When I say I dislike kissing, that's not the entire truth. It's a (soft) lie, because there hasn't been a single time that I've held a purple tulip without lowering my lips to brush against the cool petals.

draft 12: an unexplanation / an assemblage / a rumination—on art, & self, & the artistry of being

While my younger sister poses in front of Rothkos on her brief recess from a jostling lurch through the white-walled American wing / , whose plaques admit no mistake, / I read a different room. I read, beside “Seascape with Three Boats” / , each ship a beige word curled over stunning blue, / that the calligram, an abstraction of Islamic calligraphic scripts, “occurred well before the advent of twentieth century Western modernism...and continues to this today.”

I wrote this lyric essay years ago, but I feel its themes—indeterminacy, loneliness, distant forms of intimacy—are especially poignant now. So I want to share it with you, this love letter to friends, and to longing, and, too, to the possibility that sits within uncertainty.