Everybody knows
Thanksgiving weekend makes me always think of young adulthood so you’ll have to pardon the additional cringey-ness of this but I am in the mind of my high school/collegiate self as I write today’s love letter.
In high school, tragedy was being told someone loved you but wasn’t in love with you, or that someone loved you, but like a sibling. These semantic prophylactics were the talk of so many cliques because for many of us, sexual affection was the pinnacle of intimacy; new and weird.
We learned concurrently in classrooms of the many different words for different kinds of love, in the Greek and Eskimo (but probably more precisely, the Yupik) cultures. How boring that in English we’d only speak of this one phrase. This, I think, elided the fact that tragedy is a form of love. The state of lament strong enough to require a vocalization.
We learn the quiet tragedies with age. The ones that can only come out as lies because it is the silence that makes us prone. Did you know air vacating a corpse always makes a noise and it sounds like a moan? I mean I am sure you did know. Everybody knows, as Leonard Cohen said. It’s the saying things out loud that is love.
