Anne’s Reviews > Hollywood, Ending > Status Update

We love others until they can love themselves, until we can love ourselves. And all along the way, the future remains yours, ineluctably and irrevocably. You can cling to that future, as long as you need to, until with work and with time the future becomes present and the present past. You survive, and you survive, until one day, you survived.

The miracle of love is that yes, I am here and you are there, but the door is ajar. We get through that door with empathy, with imagining, with acting. We play our way through it with music and dance and art. We break down the door with love.

That’s the wonder of it all. You survive. It’s a dirty lie that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or that everything happens for a reason, but this much is true: You survive.

And that’s the truth of being an adult, I guess, insofar as we are adults. We’ve both had the kind of childhood where you learn too soon that you aren’t safe, that you never were, that the people tasked with protecting you can’t, or won’t, because they want something more from you than mere love, which is all children really have to offer.

This is just a person, and to be a person is to be vulnerable and frail and temporary.

How can we escape being products of the past?

The thing about alcohol is it quells my anxiety in the short run and worsens my anxiety in the long run. This is also the thing about weed, and the thing about Instagram.

“I like your body when it is with my body. It is so quite new a thing.”
“Original?” I ask.
“E. E. Cummings,” she says, and I laugh.

I am not sometimes in love with you. I am not sometimes anything with you. It is all the time. It is incessant. It has been incessant since I first saw you in that Pittsburgh hotel. But if I tell you that, if I tell you the truth, I put everything at risk. All of me. All of us.

The meaning of life is that we are monstrous to each other, and tender to each other, and that the monstrosity and tenderness are inseparable.