Complementary Angle
A seasonally appropriate short letter
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This letter does not follow the same structure as most of the other ones as I wanted to keep it seasonal for Valentine’s Day and brief. The first segment is in the 100s format (credited to the University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard) that I have experimented with before, the second is possibly the first poem I have written in over a decade, and the third is a short essay inspired by my (slow) reading of adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism where the concept of science fiction as a frame for change and hope is used in an unexpected and stunning way often.
Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to me after reading my last letter – I know I’ve never even met some of you, but your kind words and warm thoughts still meant a lot. My recovery is coming along really well.
COMPLEMENTARY ANGLE*
It’s February so this has to be a love letter.
***
“When you love a body you know what betrayal is. It is pretending our bodies are abstractions - so we could become dust and say our bodies were only ever stars”
Sara Elkamel, Come Here Where Are You Going Come Here
***
1. I’m in a yoga class and I am thinking about you. I should be thinking about squaring my hips, lengthening my spine, feeling my breath. I should be thinking about opening my chest, finding a stable point, engaging my muscles just enough to reach static equilibrium. I am not. I am thinking about you. Not about your face or your hands or something that you said to me. Just you as a presence, fuzzy at the edges of my conscious mind, always present when I try to find my center. Are you at my center? Are you my center?
2. I’m trying to teach you my language. My fingers move over the cracked screen with no gentleness. My phone automatically fights the foreignness they encode. You get it anyway and you write back. You remember the word for love. As in me, your love. I try to hear you say it, the warmth of your voice always with me. The first sound is difficult, I think to myself. Will you stumble over it? I’ve always liked the way you said my name. Back home, we don’t call our lovers honey, we use the word we’d use for our souls.
3. Everyone asks about our future. Will we solve the two-body problem? I repeat a neatly crafted diplomatic answer, color it slightly differently for each interlocutor hoping to avoid follow-up questions. I make it sound hopeful because that’s what they want to hear. I want to hear it too; I want the aftertaste of hope on my tongue. I am not telling them that next in my future plan is to wake up next to you, to reach for your and find something solid, to see you so physical and corporeal and spacious that you might just swallow me up.
4. As a child I once sat in an English class my mother was teaching while a student wrestled with a Shakespearean sonnet. Standing in front of the class, awkwardly as one does when being questioned, they tried explaining why the poet likened his lover’s hair to wires. Later, in literature class, I will learn that this is what made him different from other masters of the genre – objects of his poetry were realistic enough to have dirty, matted hair. On our third date, you offered to show me how to put grease in my hair just the right way.
5. I’m not going to write about the two-body problem, about inelastic collisions, about the physics of extended rigid bodies, about planets stuck in each other’s orbit. Metaphors are getting tired and so am I. You are not my center, you are not my soul, you have not collided with me, you are not stuck in my orbit. I have picked up your dirty socks from the floor. I fought your mom for calling you fat. I always see the hot sauce stains on your sweater. You are the realest thing I know – I could square my hips against yours.
***
Your mom called me from the store
Because Aldi had some weird flours in stock
And she thought of me
And my weird food
And my insatiable hunger
And she took it for granted that I’ll return
To wreak havoc in her kitchen.
(Once you lifted me up on the beige counter
Because you were hungry
And it was the opposite of havoc
And I didn’t take it for granted.)
I told her to buy two things
One practical and full of protein
(So she wouldn’t worry about my becoming too fragile)
One fatty and heavy and meant for sweets
(So she wouldn’t worry about my becoming too serious).
She read the labels over the phone
Just to make sure they fit
All the diets we had going
Mine constrained by empathy
Her by something more like arbitrary numbers.
(In terms of arbitrary numbers
You and I do quite well
A testament that we fit
That we can be serious and fragile
With each other)
On mornings when we’d have nothing in the fridge
Just odds and ends
And you’d make coffee
Grinding, boiling, mixing, waiting, pressing
I’d make weird flour pancakes
Tell you it’s a choose-your-own-adventure type of meal
Watch you scrape the bottoms of old containers of hummus
Fish for pickles in half-empty jars
Slather everything in hot sauce
Pile on that crunchy spice people like on Instagram.
I’d curl my hands around the hot cup of coffee
And feel its warmth.
(Is it too much to say
That waiting for you
Makes me boil
That you make warmer and warmer
When you curl your hands around me)
I ask you to make a cake with that other flour
The one we’ve carted back and forth between different homes
Carried it on the train tucked under unripe avocados and almond yogurt
In a big plastic bag from Aldi
That takes up too much space during rush hour.
Turns out you’re a cake virgin
A first-time baker
Though you’ve spent so much time with me in the kitchen.
The cake is imperfect: lopsided, torn a bit at the edges where you didn’t trim the baking paper
The cake is also perfect: sweet, dense, moist, piled high with raspberries and powdered sugar And swimming in almond liqueur.
Your mom can’t believe you made it
With that weird flour from Aldi
And your own two hands.
I have three slices.
I believe in your hands
I know what they feel like.
***
“My hands huge Venn diagrams: the middle is where I miss you filling me”
“Is it wrong 2 call yr partner a mirror in the sense that when we’re together I’m with myself in a way I can’t escape”
Tommy Pico, Junk
***
There are two conflicting pieces of wisdom about who we end up with and they both seem to make sense. Some argue that opposites attract. The argument goes that we crave the novelty of someone very different and their complementarity in some Zeus-cut-us-in-two-once kind of way. Some argue that we are bound to settle down with people who remind us of our parents Here, the idea is that they set off the same emotional pathways and exemplify the same relationship models that we have learned, through observation and practice, as children. Sometimes, a third and least romantic argument is made – we fall in love with folks that are close by and convenient.
These arguments, in reality, arise either in academic study or as part of a postmortem for relationships gone bad or currently disintegrating. When things are good, we rarely ask why. We rarely stop to acknowledge that it may not be exactly magic that is making it all fall into place. It kills a joke when we try to explain why it’s funny and talking about why we love beyond strong assertions of our partner’s being smart or nice or just paying us lots of attention can have a similarly souring effect. Does anyone really want to confirm that they are in love with someone because they remind them of their parents? If we say we love what is familiar, we feel like we are settling. If we say we love what is novel, we feel like we are spoiled. In a good relationship then, to keep the good feeling going, we neglect introspection in favor of adoration and devotion. When it all ends, or when it is about other people, many of us have a tendency to furiously switch into the analytic mode and theorize about every detail.
The future of relationships at this time is somewhat terrifying. So much has been written and recorded about dating apps, about young people having less sex (but also hook-up culture), and so much has been uncovered about the dark underside of it all where somehow, we are still arguing about the meaning of consent. I once heard a podcast where a tech-disruptor-type of some sort explained that we have the technology to make bots do the chit-chat for us on various dating platforms because they can learn what to say more quickly than our awkward human minds. We optimize the small talk with our respective bots based on our previous speech patterns, but who knows what happens when we actually meet our dates in person and those patterns come out of our heads rather than being spit out by an algorithm. It sounds like a setup for a science fiction story, something by a William Gibson imitator or a writer auditioning for Netflix’s Black Mirror. But regardless of robots and algorithms, at the end, love itself stands the chance of being most like science fiction.
Surely, who we are and where we come from makes a big difference in relation to who we love. We are attracted to both similarity and novelty in reference to our own self. In choosing to spend our lives with someone, we identify the sameness or the difference as something aspirational, something worth keeping around indefinitely. When we love someone, they become fundamentally tangled up with our future, even if just as a brief fantasy. So many of the future people we can become are contained in what we love about the people that we call lovers or partners. There is power in believing in being able to have a future together, but it is perhaps even more powerful to recognize that some of the things you love in others could someday reside in you as well. There may not be a more optimistic future than the one in which we can grow together to become more like the people we fell in love with. It is the future in which we interchange our best parts, employ some careful analysis and hybridize a little, if one has to use the language of robots. Love is always optimistic about the future. In a sense, it is the most informed and most inspired science fiction.
*In geometry, two complementary angles make up a right angle. If you calculate the value of one, it is very straightforward to determine the size of the other.