BY RAY LEVY-UYEDA
Last summer I flew to Italy to meet up with a woman I had dated briefly, and casually, a year prior. We spent a week there, eating and fucking and doing the things that people to in Europe. When she went home I took a night bus to Paris, and that first day there, I carted my backpack around the city, ending my day, sweaty and hungry, at the Musee d’Orsay. Tracey Emin had produced a show for them, a series of drawings called The Fear of Loving, which I felt appropriate because I had just fallen in love with the woman I had spent a full week with. I also happened to love Tracey Emin, having discovered her work a few years prior at a time when I needed to see demonstrations of messy, heartbreaking, soul-defining love. I got a neon piece of her’s tattooed on my left forearm. I preached Tracey’s goodness to anyone who would listen. She became, in my mind, a kind of hero whose work I would know only through the internet, given that I lived in the United States and her work was mostly shown in England.
I found Tracey’s work that day to be some of the most moving pieces I had ever encountered. Perhaps I was particularly primed to take in drawings about love and lovers, given that I had just recently learned what it meant to love and have a lover. I tried to write about the art many times, but found the words stalling, failing to translate feelings incited by visual art, abstractions of loneliness and sex and longing. Then I found this piece by Leslie Jamison, who, just a few years earlier, had experienced this same dilemma. I found it instructive and thought that I might offer myself the same questions, just to see what would happen. For Jamison, the piece took on the form of the catechism, but for me, a Jew, and a woman who loves women, I felt that this form mirrored a kind of different call and response.
After making love, when you’re laying next to your lover, sometimes, often, questions are asked in a whisper. These questions feel intimate and revealing, as vulnerable as two women partnered in public, and in private. Even in that sense, the public and the private, there is an exchange, a tension, of what can be asked and what can be answered.
what is a circle?
A kind of poetry. The sun. A love note. Elementary aged children learning dimensions for the first time; a circle is not a sphere; something you can touch is different than something you can hold. A paintbrush dunked in blue and passed along the paper. Something that starts over and over and over again, something that is both endings and beginnings.
what else never ends?
The weighing feeling in my body after my lover left me, back in August. That was not so long ago, my body still remembers what it was like to be held. I did not know what I wanted then. Loving is more about desire than want. I want August, but I desire her. Then, every feeling that passed through my body felt like an eternal emotion, wheels of elation followed by deep despair. Turning all around me was the beauty of Milan, and later, Paris. And all I could think about was her. You must know this feeling. Do it now, picture your lover, picture their face, hair blowing in the wind behind them, like a cape. Picture the sun setting, picture the day starting over.
does the body hold time?
Of course it does. People go to sleep, regenerate cells, old ones die and the dead ones leave. Those who have periods know many answers to a matter of “whens.” A lover’s body holds a lover. Together, these bodies hold love, created. Hold’s the time, made. Holds knowing, uncovered. This is what we call making love. Which is to say, the body that loves is a body that tells time. Other parts too: a foot holds the places it has walked. The stomach knows every meal. Extremities remember adrenaline, anxiety. Or, the pause, and sensation of sitting so close to someone you’re able to touch them. What a gift it is to touch them.
how long does it take to get over someone?
As long as it takes, or you never do. One is a line and one is a circle; one is a line with an ending you cannot see and one is a line with an ending that does not exist. Or, by crying VIOLENTLY and PERSISTENTLY, calling out their name while you sleep. Dreaming of their name while you sleep. Drawing their body, jagged marks on thin pieces of paper, a halo atop her head, something glowing, like a light or a promise.
where do tears come from?
The heart. The mind. The head. The stomach. The ocean. The stars. Dust. The Big Bang. Yes, tears come from the Big Bang. Each tear is a star exploding. The act of crying is the art of a galaxy being born. Let it come to life. Build.
That week I cried every day, all in front of her except for one night, when I turned the other way and silently weeped. I hoped that she would hear me. I hoped that she wouldn’t. I wanted to be held without being seen, but a lover is physically incapable of doing that. Touching is a kind of seeing. Watching you lover cry, a kind of hearing. In that way that loving distorts the senses. In that way that loving has nothing to do with senses. It’s all electricity.
an ocean behind our eyes?
Maybe not an ocean, just all of the things we don’t want others to see. I almost drowned in the ocean one time. I was 19, visiting family, and my sister and I went with a girl. She was about 25, which seemed old to me at the time, and all of us young adults hiked the coast, a cliff up against the water’s edge. I told her that I was a strong swimmer. I wasn’t. I’m still not. I jumped in. As I got closer to the beach the waves came in, scooped me up and spun me around. I’m sure it looked violent from the outside, but for the first time everything was still. Nothing but water, no concept of an outer world, no thought, no sight, no breathing. Perfect. Like falling asleep, like sinking back into my own body after a long time away. Like a lover, arriving.
what is holy about aloneness?
Learning yourself. Approaching knowing yourself. The pursuit of inwardness in a world that demands money and extroversion and attraction and performance. But aloneness after a lover leaves is violent, makes you think that you deserve it. Makes room for all of the beasts. Makes space for angry things like self-deception and isolation and depression and depravity.
Good aloneness has nothing to do with how many people are around you. Aloneness is where art is made. Art is always holy, what is more holy than expression, reflection, creative communion.
do you remember who told you what love was?
My ex lover. My first lover. The first woman I went on a date with. I cooked for her and we drank wine. I was 19, she was 32. It felt dangerous, I liked it. There was still so much I didn’t know. Like how to give yourself to someone. How, after you give yourself, you don’t get yourself back. You just remake what you think you lost, or make something new, rediscover who you are.
It didn’t last, of course it didn’t. But she attended to me, offered her life as a kind of map. One day, I could be open and lesbian and have my own home filled with my own art. And one day, I would be happy. One day I would keep red wine on the counter. Have a backyard where I would host pride parties. Have friends who loved me. Have love.
what did they say?
That there is a woman waiting, alone, for someone to come and hold her. Waiting for someone to watch her cry. From afar, tears look like rain. This time, the circle looks like the moon. She is holding her body up. She pushes away from the earth. There is no falling, in love. Love is a binary, it is or it isn’t. A week with my first lover, the first person I could feel my body giving itself to, I waited a week before I told her that I loved her. I cried the whole time. I couldn’t look at her. She held me, told me with her body that I was safe. I tried to listen.
what did they do to you?
She made me safe. She told me with her hands and her torso that she loved me. We contorted our bodies into crouched positions. We prayed to the center of the earth. We made love to each other. We. Made. Love. When I first saw my lover after we separated I could not wait to touch her, to have her touch me, but still, I was nervous. I was worried that she would recoil at the feeling of my palm on her chest. My hand guiding hers. I feared that touching her would cause a chain reaction of natural disasters. Touching her would rise the waters. Touching her would shake the earth. Touching her might remove me from my body.
how did they touch you?
With everything and everywhere.
when did you learn about pleasure?
Then, I thought that standing face to face with her, any kind of her, was safe. Now, the fear is that someone can make me feel good. It’s the absence of a thing that hurts more than anything. I learned about pleasure when I was too young to be afraid of it, though I am still young. I am still learning. Such a particular and peculiar thing for all of us queer kids to grow up. Growing up gay and not realizing I was gay, pleasure was a gnawing feeling, localized adrenaline, a tingly sensation in my right arm. Pleasure was an animal I hid, this animal wanted. How horrifying to me that I could not fulfill these wants. Intuitively, I understood that someone else could want with me. I learned that pleasure was not done to someone, pleasure is created with someone.
and the pain of loving someone up close?
There is no loving another in proximity without pain. All relationship is proximity.
is your lover a mirror?
Not many months into our relationship I said something to my lover, to which she responded, not as a question but as a statement, I wonder how you see me. Which I took as, I wonder if you see me. I’m not sure I did. Loving someone up close reveals all the parts of them that you do not understand, or cannot be understood. Still, I loved her without understanding her. Maybe that is all love: loving without understanding. Just wanting to be with someone. Love is a pull. Love is not a thought.
what do you see?
Blue and black and fading lines. A drawing made by a paint brush, and a brush moved by a woman. I see time and water and light. Ink, made into a story. A story in picture form across a single canvass. I see all of my memories of the past week. She is in all of them, she is all of them.
what is the most intimate thing you can think of?
Her.
do you dream of intimacy?
I dream of being open with her, or someone else. I dream of someone who will want to see me open. I dream of sitting in the sunlight with my lover and we are not speaking. We are outside and it is spring. The air, the flowers, the trees, the sun, are all anew. We are anew. I dream of looking at her and her, me, witnessing each other’s beginnings. The other in circle.
where do your hands go at night?
Under my head, to catch my tears.
how much does the emotion of your water weigh? (how much did you cry?)
Only when it hurts, which is to say, only when I am aware of the hurt, when I let myself feel.
what does G-d have to do with heartbreak?
In my time of heartbreak I turned to G-d.
Ray Levy-Uyeda is a Bay Area-based freelance writer who focuses on gender, politics and activism. You can find her work elsewhere at Teen Vogue, Fortune and Vice. Find her on Twitter @raylevyuyeda.
