Cigarettes are so frequently an affect, in writing and in life. She smokes because she likes it, and I like this about her.  I say so, one night. “I’m just better at performing my identity than you,” she says. I find this inexplicably funny, but I’m very tired, too.  Writers, trying to construct the early parts of love for an audience, use single, ornamented images like these; otherwise they hurry, throwing out a stock of frantic conversations with excitement and discovery, recounting with a staccato urgency the tearing of clothes and writhing limbs in beds and bathrooms and on floors. They remember long talks of mutual recognition with clocks ignored till daylight. The trouble of course is that in deploying these clichés, they are trying to summon somehow, in retrospect, the feeling of a time that appeals precisely in its disregard for retrospect. The howling, late night conversation, the frantic fucking: the beauty is in the shared feeling that we’ve finally got it right, and for a moment can believe we won’t need to talk about it later in more nuanced, measured tones.

On the Kinds of Love We Fall Into: Polyamory in Theory and Practice | Saturday, February 22, 2014 @ 4:52pm