Love Likes a Dare
And my bottom teeth are crooked and you have mustard on your shirt
When I was young I used to flatten chewing gum with my tongue. Rolling it along the roof of my mouth like dough on a counter, I’d spread it just thin enough so it wouldn’t break. Then peel it off at precisely the right moment, feeling that urgency found in childhood for arbitrary yet detrimental things. I’d press it between my teeth and place one deep single bite and hold it there like it were a mouthguard or a mold. After, pulling it from my mouth, I’d examine the imperfect shape the teeth were set. There I saw everything the dentist pointed out was wrong. The slight overbite, the overlap of the front two teeth, the sideways glance my bottom row seemed to be making at each other. I was not born with perfect teeth, they were bought.
I did it after having braces too, when the teeth no longer freely diverted in any direction. Marking any change, marking the way my jaw fell when I didn’t wear my retainer, easily reverting back to the overbite. Though never entirely it was slighter now, even less noticeable than before.
I know that I wanted braces and I know that I didn’t think my teeth were unsightly. I was never embarrassed. Maybe I’d have grown up to be. Certainly now there are moments where I’m smiling in a photo and I think how nice my teeth look, straight in a row on top. I get the sense of gratitude that I got braces, how after I lost my retainer only below the smile line seemed to move, pushing the right side corner tooth to the back like an afterthought. My bottom row always feuding with each other it seems. But I wanted braces, I know I did.
I don’t think I knew then why I wanted them. Looking back it feels like speculation, the kind that only comes with age and wanting to think highly of yourself probably. Of hoping you were wiser than you were, but I won’t give myself the satisfaction. I think I simply know something now that I was slightly attuned to back then. The thought that flaws can be endearing to those around us. To the point that we will actively go out of our way, even if only to correct them, draw attention to the blemish we sought acceptance of.
I feel that strange tie to my 13-year-old self who wanted to be different in the right kind of way. That lack of naivety within that thinking which saw my humanity as acceptable, even attractive to other people who in turn I liked regardless of the cutting metal in their mouths. So to say, that strange feeling of middle school where you are so aware of the flaws that burden someone’s social hierarchy who, despite your better judgment and the fear of your peers, you like anyway.
I guess I lost that wonder, miraculous in its own way, because by my mid 20’s I realized I had failed to procure the deeper kind of love from any of the people I let into my life. Or at least, it did not so fully and unapologetically live in spite of something because I myself was unwilling to be spited. That fear of being seen imperfectly ringing in my ear like an iron bell. I’d dole out little pieces of me, which were polished and the good kind of imperfect, but agreeable nonetheless. Always in the right pajamas, always in the best of bad moods. Even though my own love seemed to be fueled by the knowledge I had, rooting itself deep and irrevocably, of what happened when I saw anyone in their truer selves.
The kind of selves we can’t help but find in the heat of summer. The ones without any buffer, which have lost the buffer on the way in the door, because the AC on the train didn’t work and thus they have sweat all the good stuff away. Like deodorant or hair gel, like the crisp linen of a shirt or the dryness of an upper lip. Full of something, admiration, which doesn’t even gloss over what could be repulsive but actually looks directly at it in a more sincere way. I’d take the clammy palm of the man whose love I found snagging on me like a thorn and kiss them anyway, put their arm around me, run my hands through their hair.
I can, with good conscious, admit that I always knew summer to be a kind of place for something pure in its grime. The same way that a house becomes a home when you finally get a ring around the sink. It has to be lived in first, has to be marked by that beating heart of the person who stays there. I find I want to say that it’s unfortunate, but it isn’t at all. Yet there’s also no justification which by writing at all would tarnish the very statement itself that sees other people's lewdness as anything other than what love is. The double helix, it's the good it's the bad snaking its way up repeating endlessly into any kind of forever we’re allowed.
Other people have pointed out, to the point of cliche, how wrong the idea of love being something that we fall into it. How reductive, how unfit it is to capture the rugged motion where one thing transforms into another. Not at all a falling, but a snagging. Which inherently points to the idea that things are out of place, poking out.
I think love always likes a dare. A moment when faced with the snort of a nose or a seed in the teeth it’s asked, surely you can’t love me, not like this. But love always needs the 20$. Taking the bet to cover lunch and the bus fare almost as easily as the blush of embarrassment that doesn’t show up. And it's an improbable situation, but it exists even if you’d never thought to consider it. Where watching someone rub mustard unsuccessfully from their shirt you realize you’re not going anywhere. So what’s it matter, keep the 20$.
There’s probably a better easier way to explain it. Less lyrical, more real and imperfect like I’ve been saying. So let me just say it.
I’ve dated here and there, but there is one man in all my life who sticks out as one of those very great loves. The one in which you live as a continuous proof you can survive its aftermath. Everything we did was a verification of what I knew when I got braces.
One night, in the middle of the time we knew each other, I was very drunk and embarrassed by how drunk I was. Too short a time after meeting him I got very sick and I ran into his bathroom to throw up. After it was all over the emptiness of my body weighed on me, and I took a very long time to make the short walk back to his room. I was embarrassed almost to the point of tears. I turned the corner sheepishly and he sat waiting, having heard the whole thing. And he said before I could say anything, maybe knowing I’d feel ashamed, maybe just wanting to point it out,
“You could get sick in my bed and I wouldn’t even care. It might be a bit annoying to change the sheets but I wouldn’t make you help.”
Which was perhaps one of the greatest declarations of love I have ever really been given. I could probably draw up some very beautiful words, as I tend to, of what I want someone to say to me. The love without consequence, the comforting thought that it is stunning and glittering in my imagination. A pristine kind of thing, slipping very easily in and out of the world, but even that wouldn’t be as nice as what he’d said. You could say the bar is low, or maybe there is always a failure, in the imagination, to capture that grit. The one that’s so coarse it breaks you down, cements itself in the place where your expectations used to be. That doesn’t say I love your smile, everyone says that to me, I had braces. But instead says you could be sick as a dog right there for me to see, by your own hand, and I would change the sheets for you. You can annoy me, inconvenience me, disgust me, and I would still make sure you had somewhere good to sleep.
Episode of Longing #7
You are on the bus, crossing Brooklyn, trying to make your way back home. The trip is longer than the day, and the day is shorter than the moment between stops where you currently rest, idle, thinking. Looking out the window with a hand to the cheek, it feels like almost outside. Almost what you aren’t sure. You don’t know this area, not well at least. It runs parallel to a neighborhood you used to go to and there’s an adjacent feeling like you could know this place proportional to the short distance between where you once were. As if it were somehow the edge of a stamp that had not been pressed too hard so the ink isn’t as dark or wet. You could get off, walk that way, toward that old place with its old knowledge just to confirm it had changed, but you’re trying not to do that kind of thing or exercise that kind of thought. The thought that says there’s something to go back to.
Instead, you try and think of what you can’t know, but from the place you currently sit. Like if they’re there, if the light would even be on this early in the evening. If they’re as close as they feel because you’re near something you used to share. If the bus were not five avenues over, if their street didn’t move traffic in the wrong direction, would there be a universe where they looked out at precisely the right moment and saw you sitting there wondering about them? None of it feels good, no answer is the one you want because there probably isn’t. And anyway you think, you’re in this universe and in this one they probably no longer live in that apartment where you were once so coiled around each other, you woke up with the shape of their face imprinted on your own.
Slowmaxxing: a term popularized by @robyns_quill is about taking your time and the way we can enjoy and appreciate life when we really look at it. My version of living slowly has involved mulling over the things I consume for longer. Here’s what has been circling my brain:
Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto: “But life went on, even at times like this, and it was surprising how easy it was to keep going as though nothing had changed. I found it strange that I could walk down the street and appear normal, just like anyone else. That I could be in complete turmoil inside, and yet my reflection in a shop window could look the same as it ever had.”
The French Dispatch dir. Wes Anderson: I liked The French Dispatch, but it wasn’t until my sister mentioned this one line, that I really watched this scene. Home, in and of itself is a fully formed concept. Which often I think lends itself to the idea that it is thus full in our admission of it. It’s true though, what they’re saying. Something is always missing, and yet nothing is ever that initial lack. The one that led you to go searching in the first place.
Litttlestars Tumblr post:“i think names are such a delicate thing and we don’t say each other's names enough bc why else does it strike such a chord in me when ppl say my name as if i actually exist” While I was studying creative nonfiction in college I had a teacher give a lecture on dialogue. She said to us that a common mistake people make was they use names and no one ever really uses another person’s name in everyday conversation. At least not a lot. And I remember I was with this boy at the time and he said my name so often it made me want to say no it’s not true!!! But then I realized no one else really said it. And in part, there was so much love between him and me that saying each other’s name was the only way we could voice it at the time, so we just said it always, confirming the existence of each other. I can’t explain our intimacy better than that.
Heavensghost aka griefmother collage art
Elena Ferrante for the Paris Review: I have struggled all my life with what it means to tell the truth in my writing and feel that something was said here that alleviated something in me. Which is often, I am finding, what Ferrante’s work does. To the point, it is so clear, you wonder if it is your pen name atop the work of an interview you don’t remember having.
That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters
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My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go.
My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me
My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here!
Here’s to Starbucks Fridays, to not throwing up in your bed, to loving you even if you did!
Love always,
Chloé