The Things I Don’t Know How to Leave Behind
“Let’s face it, we’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something."
–Judith Butler, from Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, as quoted by Masha Tupitsyn in the post Mourning After
With about 40 hours to go before I board a plane for Thailand where I’ll be doing something that I’ve been planning to do for over a decade, my mind and heart are a bit anxious, a bit restless. Trying to make sense of things that I know I can’t hope to fully make sense of before I go, if ever.
For the past several months, I’ve often come across things Masha Tupitsyn has written right when they might resonate with me the most. Today, while listening to this lovely audio tribute to her book Love Dog, I heard her read part of her post Mourning After, and was amazed at how, in the post, she asks the questions I’ve been asking myself lately, though I could never articulate them as precisely as she does. She writes,
What if you give up (let go) too soon? What if you hold on for too long? When should you leave and when should you stay? When are you pushing someone away and when are you letting someone in? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I am always wrestling with them.
Earlier today, I cited another of Tupitysn’s posts, one in which she refers to the "radical love ethic” of Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character in the film Say Anything. This made me think of the opening scene of the film in which Lloyd, whose friends caution him against pursuing Diane Court because (as they say) they don’t want to see him get hurt, responds by saying, “I want to get hurt!”


And in Mourning After, Tupitsyn writes,
When it comes to love, it takes a lot of time and mourning for me to let someone go. If it isn’t even going to hurt, and if I’m not going to live with the hurt, why even let someone in? If there isn’t even a chance of being hurt—undone?
I definitely don’t want to get hurt, but I also don’t want to let the fear of getting hurt change the way I love. Masha Tupitsyn again:
There is simply no place for real, and therefore radical, heartache in this culture. No time and no place. We teach ourselves and each other what it means to love by what we say about it. What we’re allowed to say and what we’re not allowed to say. What we’re trained to say (our ready-made vocabularies and cultural discourses) and what we’ve already said. Women have historically been permitted to say more about it, but that’s because of the trivialization not just of women, but love in general. When it comes to love, we circulate either a repressive and reactionary set of values and narratives, or disposable platitudes. Sometimes we give up too soon and sometimes we don’t try at all. We miss the opportunity to try. We don’t say enough, when we should say everything.
I’m operating, socially and romantically, as an adult queer woman, after essentially not operating at all for quite a long time. And now that I sometimes find myself feeling things quite strongly for other people, I seem to be the sort who says everything. (“You can say anything to me.” –Say Anything) And when I do say everything, I feel like I’m falling, like I’m breaking the rules of a game that I haven’t yet learned how to play. Maybe there are lessons I need to learn about the ways in which people love (or don’t love) each other, or about the ways in which they talk about (or don’t talk about) that love. Maybe saying everything makes my feelings seem unreasonable. (“Hunger like a storm,” says Paul Williams in the Daft Punk song “Touch.” “Do ya think what I’m asking’s too much?” Bruce Springsteen sings in “Human Touch.”) But even if those feelings seem unreasonable, I’m deeply averse to the idea of trying to squeeze them into boxes that might make them more palatable. In a recent email, I wrote, “it’s like I’ve finally been able to get out of that little cage my soul’s been kept in for so long and start feeling the sun on my face. Which is wonderful, and oddly painful." I’ve worked too long and too hard for a kind of freedom to willingly compromise any of it now.
One last set of questions from Tupitsyn’s post, questions I can’t seem to get out of my head:
What if I stay and you don’t want me to? What if my loving you despite you telling me you don’t want me to is what will ultimately bring us together? What if waiting and holding on is part of what makes a love possible? What if one person has to learn to let go and the other person has to learn to hold on? What if that’s the bond at stake? What if that’s the road to, the test of, love?
These are the things I’m thinking about as my trip to Thailand looms, as I look over the things I’m taking with me because I need them, and the things I’m taking with me because I don’t know how to leave them behind.
Notes
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asylos said: Best wishes for the trip and all it involves.
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