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 Angie Sijun Lou | Jessica gives me a chill pill
Angie Sijun Lou | Jessica gives me a c…

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.

radical queerness

Love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorry that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an imporatnce aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion. Knowing this and possessing the courage to claim our grief as an expression of love's passion does not make the process simple in a culture that would deny us the emotional alchemy of grief.

—bell hooks, All About Love

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.

| Ella Risbridger, Cupboard love: my bi…
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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.

| Clarice Lispector, from “The Egg and …

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

∆ Love after Love, by Derek Walcott

Love after Love by Derek Walcott
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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

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