BEAR SEASON
Your relationships have limited time.
That was my daily takeaway message on the Co-Star app some weeks ago, while it was still summertime. This phrase settled in me like a cold sweat when I first read it.
Yeah, love itself cannot die, but I will. I have a finite number of opportunities to reach out, make repairs, write my letters, tell my jokes, share songs, respond to texts, and eat cake with my beloveds.
It’s November, and what started as a cold, existential sweat has since honeyed into romanticism and sentimentality. When the days grow stark and gray, I think of myself as human no more, but as bear. I continue to show up as capitalism demands me to, but I show up coated, buried under my layers, a small part of me tucked away and dreaming. Onlookers may not see me for my obsidian eyes, clawed hands, and hunched back, but I see me as I really am. Curled up inside myself, I’m in love with the missing. Feeling wistful tastes sweet in my mouth.
I know I’m not the only bear wearing a human suit right now. Isn’t it funny that, when we resemble what’s natural—our ebbing selves reflecting the plants shrinking away from the sun, winged creatures’ migration to places far away—it gets summed up as being SAD?
Anyway, even if it’s from my own personal hinterland, my thoughts are filled with memories, thinking with fondness about all those who have walked into my life, and those who have walked back out. I’m sending them unaddressed letters that never leave my mind to let them know that I do not need proximity in order to wish them warmth, good sleep, companionship, salves for their hurts. I’ve been making new things while I hold them in my mind.
Lately I’m starting to reconsider the love language of gift-giving (while continuing to, you know, take love languages, itself, with a grain of salt). I’ve always thought that gift-giving was fairly unimportant to me. Christmas is my least favorite holiday, part of that being the pressure involved with gifts, the spending, the consumerism, yadda, yadda, yadda. But just this morning, I was doing some gift planning for a couple of the people closest to me and was filled with giddiness. This sense of…glee. I wish I could adequately describe it to you.
Feeling this way reminded me that one of my very favorite memories was my dad’s response to a gift I sent him in 2020. A year before his death, he had finally tuned up his kit and was playing again. Covid running rampant, me being unable to be there to see it and hear his playing in person, I arranged for him to get a Cameo from a drummer who was an idol and a teacher in his eyes, encouraging him to keep going. My stepmom recorded his reaction. The surprise. Oh my god. I live for that, still. He kept saying, “How? How did you do that?” and when I hear him asking that in my mind, it feels like my heart is being filled with sunshine.
To embody love is to exist in light, and there are so many ways to do that. Love can travel a distance, it can defy endings. But still, it means something to give people their flowers while they’re here.
With love,
Kit
✺ I have a playlist filled with sentimental pop, which I continually add to. I’ve been turning to it a lot this week, and I highly recommend having one for yourself. It’s important that—and I cannot stress this enough—it’s pop. Or the closest you can get. Mine has a lot of Khalid and Sam Smith on it. I pick songs specifically about seeking out intimacy (or providing it), resilience, and unmasking. It feels like medicine, and it’s an extra delight to play it with a nod to my inner teen who would have rather died than listen to Justin Bieber.
✺ My partner and I have been engaging in very serious discussion about how to differentiate between something (song, book, movie, what have you) that is very good from something that is now-it’s-in-my-bloodstream-forever good. What shifts something we like to something that’s a favorite? Is this discernment important? And how is it that knowing someone else’s favorites of everything is still one of the most beautiful goddamn things that we humans ever came up with?
✺ Have you seen book covers lately? There are so many books released this year that I want to buy because of the cover art. (Check the Ellsworth Kelly piece on the cover of Pure Color). What an odd dream to have something you’ve made as the skin of something someone else has made.
✺ Cool Whip on top of the morning cup of coffee just to make it a little extra.
✺ End-of-the-year reflections and work self-evaluations as mini life reviews. We’ve been microdosing death planning for much longer than we’ve realized, and practicing small, socially encouraged rituals for grief without naming it grief.
✺ The inherent power of asking the right question. The impact of asking loving questions. Lately I’ve been asking people what questions they most like being asked, so now, Reader, I’d like to ask you. What questions do you most like being asked?
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