And so for awhile, we orbited around each other in this way. Forces of gravity, or probably something much simpler keeping us in each other's periphery. Rotating, bound, but never close enough to let our hands touch.
He would leave a party with a girl and I would get there early to see him. I would kiss someone and mean it, and he would make me a playlist the next day. We always adored each other at the wrong times. A pendulum type of love, he was everything I thought was golden and I was the one he could never quite wrap his hands or his head around.
But at seventeen there was another him: a different boy, but a familiar orbit. I was always passenger in his car, white subaru on 580 at sunset, the clanging of water bottles in the footwells. We talked about our older siblings too much and made the world bigger for each other than it was then. I liked to watch him watch the road and he would look at my lips when I talked. Everything we never said to each other was strung across the console, tension tied tight in the distance between our hands. With him it was all parking lots and big ideas.
I used to adore our goodbyes. He would park in front of my house and turn the headlights off. Teenage eye contact, always an almost-kiss with the ignition still on. It was a love we never quite knew what to do with.
I used to have this theory that good love could never exist for me. My desire, this inexhaustible boundless thing, was too much for another person and so I wrapped myself in a thin film of almosts. An apple on a stick held in front of a horse, everything I thought was perfect hovered like this. Everything I thought was perfect, I never let myself touch. I thought that if I kept love in limbo, that it would always be almost true.
And so it goes when neglected for too long, the truth eventually crystallized and then cracked open. I felt alone.
The thought felt so immediately fully formed that I knew this is what had been quietly taking shape in the background for months and maybe even years. When you’ve been raised to believe that the most valuable thing a person can be is self-sufficient, it only takes this one thought to crumble your sense of self. It calcified into syllables and slipped out whispered and heavy on my bed.
I feel alone.
A big black hole opened where the words fell and I let my body go limp as I fell willingly into it. Willingly, because I knew I could not take back the thought and willingly, because this black hole on West 8th was the one thing I knew I could not avoid by distancing myself from it. The free fall was disorienting and honest, and lasted three months. These are the moments that were crucial during that time:
Getting rejected one month & doing the rejecting in the next: There’s a trend in my romantic relationships where I rarely let myself like the other person more than they like me— the Principle of Lesser Desire. With some people it makes me feel like a villain and with others like a vessel for their pleasure. In every scenario, it makes me feel safe because I am in control. So I guess it makes sense that in the first situationship after admitting that I was lonely, I knew I had to open the floodgates. The roles reversed and for the first time in a while, I was the desirer not the desired. I vomited up vulnerability because, well, isn’t that what you’re supposed to do to make love appear? Chunks of me landed on the floors of a room he had already walked out of. He told me he just wanted to be friends and it struck me that no matter how healthy or how old I get, rejection is never really about you but it will always, always feel like it is.
The next month, that familiar imbalance grew again with a new person. I was more fragile than I was desperate then, so I locked my love back up and the politics of desire worked in my favour, right where I’m comfortable with it being.
As I tried desperately to date my way out of this loneliness, faces and nights weaved themselves into one ugly theme: Desire is a weighted game, and good love can never exist for me because I will only ever want what I can’t have.
My 22nd birthday: I did not tell anyone that it was coming up, and did not plan a single thing. I was scared that doing so would prove that I had indeed pushed love to the peripheries and that everyone important in my life had gotten to such a lukewarm association with me that my phone would be flooded with “HBD! Wish I could celebrate, but am busy tn” texts. Instead, I booked a flight to Toronto with one close friend. I had gotten too good at baby-proofing my life.
But on the morning of my birthday, after sitting on the runway for three hours, the pilot announced that everyone must deplane, that the flight had been cancelled due to bad weather and that he’s very sorry but you don’t get to escape your birthday, Tessa, and that you’re stuck here in this city and in your puddle of self pity with your tepid friendships and no plans. The pilot didn’t actually announce that last part over the loudspeakers but he might as well have.
The truth of the matter is that my birthday was the breaking point. I realized I could have organized a room full of people to gather that day, where love and wine would have flowed freely and, yes, my heart would be out of my chest and pulsing there in my hands, but isn’t that where it should be? Isn’t that how everything good happens? Instead I was on the floor of an airport, terrified at the reality that I if I didn’t change something now, that I would live out the rest of my life taking flight and filtering out love like this. It made my stomach drop. How much love had I missed out on? How much pain had I caused? It had never been more clear than in this moment that I couldn’t keep operating this way. Just swallowing my desire and getting through a day, again and again and again. When intuitively I feel something as deeply as I felt this, I will always, always perform alchemy on the scale of a life. And so I did.
The only thing I can think to say is that at its most potent, love is a loose thread on your oldest shirt. Which is to say: if you pull at its timid start, love unravels. It exposes. And so that March I began to notice all the loose threads left unpulled only because I had been fearful of my own nakedness, and scared of the vulnerability that comes with being loved. The hem of this life was ragged with opportunities I had left hanging in the air. The unanswered texts, the distanced friendships, the empty afternoons. And so to quote something that came out of one of my lovely friend Liva’s sisterhood circles, I realized I had to show a tit. As in, pull on the loose threads, be vulnerable with the world! Let that tattered old shirt unravel, it’s tired. Show a tit!
It makes it so that one morning you wake up and lightness comes easy to you, and it’s so foreign a feeling it makes you cry. You think about how one second you can find yourself free falling down a black hole in your bed— lonely and jaded in your small life— and then the next second you’re whizzing across space on the back of a motorcycle with your arms wrapped around the boy you love. There is Oregon wind and no destination, and the pavement beneath you is moving so fast but it’s there, solidly, and you are there, solidly, and when you smile into the wind your teeth go dry. You’ve been waiting so long for a love like this.
It is of course about him, but in the way that love cannot exist without lack, it is mostly a story about desire.
A girl, somewhere, closes a tab. A hand, becoming aware of its proximity to another, moves to the safety of a lap. A doorknob turns halfway and then releases. Someone positions her body in such a way. A mother gives the last bite of her food to her child. A plane leaves the ground and the wife is not on it. Someone, somewhere else, glances away.
I am sitting at a table across from the teenage girl that I will never not be, and she is looking past me at something or someone else. My cheeks are wet, I am pouring so much love into the most beautiful bowl for her. I wish she would let me hold her hand, I wish she would let me eat this meal with her. She is so hungry, but she does not want me to know it. I have lived more years than her, and I have enough love in me now to fill up another bowl for her when this one gets cold. And so I will sit here at this table filling bowl after bowl until she grows up, until her gaze meets mine— tenderly— and we can eat this meal together. The most generous thing I know how to give is the time and space for desire to expand.
I’m sorry this one was so late, it’s been the hardest to write. I’m sitting in a cafe on Main Street with tears streaming down my face. To anyone who has ever loved me like this, the most revolutionary thing I can say is thank you. I’ve been thinking and reading so much about desire that it’s become one of those things I see in everything. Joy Sullivan wrote a fantastic Substack piece about it and the comments under it are even better. You can read it here. I also got absolutely slammed into a wall after reading Three Women by Lisa Taddeo. She writes about desire and everything we do that gets in the way of it: to please, to be believed, to not get hurt, to not get scolded. It is cathartic and heartbreaking and loud, yet even in her interviews, the author writes “I thought I was writing a quiet little book”.
Alright, onto the lighter stuff:
BBQ at mine— you grab the margarita mix, I’ll pick some flowers & let’s be 20-somethings together.
This one really is ripe and juicy. It’s my summer get-together playlist, meant to be played on a speaker outside with the volume turned up for select songs. You know, when the beginning of a song makes conversation trail off and everybody at the party snap their heads up. There are some classics on there— Kendrick, Daft Punk, Bob Marley, MJ, A Tribe Called Quest— and then a whole mixed bag of slightly lesser known stuff that will get people moving. Honourable mentions: Parcels, Burna Boy, L’Impératrice, Little Simz, Toro y Moi. I don’t know how Vivaldi’s Four Seasons ended up on there but it belongs and I can’t explain it.
The most hilarious series about, well, exactly what it sounds like. A year after their marriage, two brides and a very under qualified detective launch a full-scale investigation (complete with lie detector tests and forensic experts) to find out which of their loved ones shat on the floor at their wedding. An absolute shit show.
I’ve never listened to this podcast before and am not usually one for crime podcasts, but a creator I really look up to posted about how spiritual it was. It’s about a 23 year old elementary school teacher who survived a stabbing, but the way she survived it and the spirits she came in contact with while she was bleeding out is insane. I really do believe that intuition is the bridge to a very real supernatural world. Whether or not you believe in the supernatural, it’s one of those stories that won’t leave your head for a long, long time.
I have to do a little shoutout here. Love in Public is the brainchild of Abril Soewarso-Rivera, one of my best friends and a rockstar of a host. She’s created this incredible platform for storytellers of all disciplines— artists, teachers, friends, filmmakers, musicians, activists— and I find myself re-listening to episodes just to be reminded of the expansiveness of creativity in our little community. I must admit though, I’m the writer for Love in Public, so I’m a little biased…
But we just wrapped up production for Season 3, where six interviews were filmed live— all in one weekend— with the help of the always incredible First Floor Collective. I’m really excited about this upcoming season. The interviews have a conversational intimacy and stream-of-consciousness that we’ve never been able to capture before, and I think is all around rare to find in the podcasting world. While we put the finishing touches on this season, you can satiate yourself with one of my personal favourite eps that I’ve linked above. Stay updated here: Instagram Website
That’s it for this month! Unless, of course, you want to upgrade to a $5 monthly subscription where you can listen to me read all this aloud + rant and ramble about other fun semi-related things, all layered over a beautiful soundscape made by Alonso Daboub (@alonsodaboub_music). It’s like a scrappy podcast episode. Good for mindless dishwashing or laundry folding if you’re tired of looking at screens. Not required, but always cool to financially support artists and their work!
*Paid subscribers: the audio should be in your inbox now! This month’s podcast is an interesting one— along with the audio reading, I’ve included a conversation I had with my parents on the back porch of my childhood home. We talk about a lot of big systemic stuff (generational wealth, the meritocracy, etc), but in a way that felt really introspective and personal.
As always, if you feel inclined to share any snippets of what I’ve written here, my Instagram is @generativish (and @ttess.a), please tag me— I will probably cry alone in gratitude about it. My DMs (along with comments on here & IG) are checked often and lovingly, and I get ridiculously excited every time someone relates to or engages with what I write. This is nothing if not a conversation.
See you soon!
tessa! I've been putting off reading this forever so I can keep it in my inbox like a tamagotchi that wards off loneliness. today was a lonely day so I thought I'd read it and wow! your writing is phenomenal in a way that splits me open, and I'm glad I read it today because it was perfect timing (for lots of personal reasons but also yesterday I discovered toro y moi on the radio while I was on the bus). thank you for sharing this. and people with money will want to buy your things! I say this with confidence as someone with no money who would buy your things if I wasn't broke. love always, -H
TISS! So you knoooooow I have been holding off on reading your recent Substack pieces like a bushy-tailed squirrel storing away treats before winter’s arrival – but I read this one today on a ferry ride from Amorgos to Athens and once again, I’m struck by you + the way you string words together, magician girl! Honorable mention to some of my favorite lines: “always an almost kiss with the ignition still on” | “chunks of me landed on a the floor of a room he had already walked out of” | “a hand, becoming aware of its proximity to another, moves to the safety of a lap” | “tepid friendships and no plans” | “everything we never said to each other was strung across the console, tension tied tight in the distance between our hands”
YOUR WRITING MAKES ME FEEL SO SEEN THANK YOU FOR SHOWING A TIT
I didn’t say it on your birthday because sitting on the floor of YVR on that day in March felt like the biggest joke of the year (friendship base, lolololol!), but you are an absolute gift – the human equivalent of an outstretched hand. To be in constant conversation with you is one of the joys of my life, I hope you know!
P.S. In true Tessa-Abril style, I read this one aloud to Ebba (it was her second time consuming it) and the whole of the Blue Star Naxos ship got to be in on the loveliest meditation on love and desirability… I’d like to think a few people were leaning in to catch the end, but maybe that’s just the romantic in me.