Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

∆ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

the radical concept of queerness, the concept that makes us most uncomfortable, is to defy categorization entirely — to have ambiguous genders and nationalities and sexualities. To resist the consolidation, reification, and policing of identities.

I fell in love with her in a kitchen, too: my old kitchen, 4am, fluorescent fridge-light, her eating cold leftovers, me pouring boiling water on to a pair of teabags. We were both sort of despairing in those days, and though we had known each other for a long time it was in that kitchen that I knew for sure that I loved her completely. I have never had a kitchen I didn’t fall in love in; I never want to.

Lost in a dream I make breakfast…I shout for the children who sprout from various beds, drag the chairs out and eat, and the work of the breaking day begins, shouted and laughed and eaten, white and yolk, merriment amid fighting, the day that is our salt and we are the day’s salt, living is extremely tolerable, living keeps us busy and distracts us, living makes us laugh.

We don’t want to live a frivolous life, we don’t want to live a superficial life. We want to be serious with each other, with our friends, with our work. That doesn’t necessarily mean gloomy or grim, but seriousness is something that we are deeply hungry for, to take ourselves seriously and to be able to enjoy the nourishment of seriousness, that gravity, that weight.

| Leonard Cohen