I knew your answer would begin with several long paragraphs about the political situation. After all this time, I still find your tirades sexy. And lovable.

Oops, I used the word, in adjectival form. I’ve been trying to avoid it, especially after you told me how American it was, this business of saying ‘I love you’ all the time. But if you can say it why can’t I? I do love you, profoundly, but I’m also not sure if I’m in love with you. It’s hard to understand, because you would think that if you loved someone and you also felt as much desire for them as I feel for you that that would be what being in love was.

But I think being in love is when you allow yourself to enter into a state of fiction, where you become very vulnerable, completely open, naïve, and naked. The fiction is thinking: ‘I can only be happy with this person.’ Of course, your friends always see this for what it is from the outside. They know you could be happy with someone else, if you chose that.

Believing in the fiction of your singular necessity isn’t really possible for me, because of your emotional distance. Also, between us, there are all those other kinds of distance – of language, nation, age, social context. Fame. I won’t even speak of politics because that’s more ambiguous with you. But of course even if you share those things with someone, even if they would seem to correspond to you in so many ways, there are those moments when you realize that they’re miles away from you. Even, I’m sure, if they’re the same sex.

Anyway, being in love. It’s a huge, beautiful luxury. I do it with more facility than you.

~Barbara Browning [buy]

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