notes on heavy raining days

“I am a love theorist” is what Lauren Berlant wrote in mid-2012 on Supervalent Thought after the title “The Book of Love is Long and Boring, No One Can Lift the Damn Thing …” Their philosophical I moves through their own feelings of dissociating from all their loves—sometimes. They wrote: “Detachment on a good day, dissociation during the stressful ones, overwhelmed and awkward on the days that begin flooded, and when it works, a lot of imitative affect mixing optimism and protective coating so that, reliably, while the internal objects are splashing around the external ones are getting the best of it.” They started as an ideology critique going down to the narrow hole. And here Berlant is, a love theorist who sometimes dissociate from all their loves.

my dear, i’m wondering: what kind of feelings-in-sometimes i have cultivated so that i can become a love historian?

I sometimes feel detachment from all my loves. D once said this; about my detachment, the distance that I keep, the stern attitude I maintain so that I can keep caring and sustain my attention for her, for my beloveds. Detachment without coldness; that’s what she gestured about me. My skin surface is always cold yet my inside always fires and burns. I care from this gap between what I feel with-in and what I actually do with-out. D reminds me of this—of my ways of being in friendship, in relationship. It takes years for me; it takes more than a decade; it takes accumulated hours and minutes of talking, having meals together, sharing bed, not to close the gap and overcome detachment but to keep them as an empty space where our relationship keeps happening.

I approach the archives of everyday life from such a distance. I’m not a historian who loves too much. I used to think I’m a historian who hates too much. I keep revising my position: perhaps I’m a historian who detaches enough. Avoiding easy familiarity and relatability—that people in the past also shared similar emotions with our time, that they also love like we love—is my mission as a historian. One’s love in nineteen-twenty-four has a specific context, content, and form; and so do we living in twenty-twenty-something. Detachment in relations, detachment from time.

tapi sayangku, I bite my own tongue, grinding my own head to the shredder of reality that i’m a historian who writes about past-life from within a life too. structure of feelings is built through time.

D and I have been together for almost fifteen years through different intensities, often-changing physical distance, and times spent; and together we grew a habit of calling and picking up objects (phone, camera, coffee) and feelings, putting them as the core of our long conversations “feelings …. feelings … feelings ….” and so we always readjust and recalibrate our relationship. We often go back to the time we were. We jump to the time we would be. The now-present is an encounter between the past and the future, and here we ride our relations.

The thing is, I cannot not think about our scripts of people. The people D invites into my life, and vice versa; the right ones, the wrong ones—if there’s such a thing; the ones who stay, the ones who drift away, the ones who sail and return. I don’t make much conversations by myself that I can call people my “friends.” Guarded, suspicious. I was a wall even when I joined a flock. D makes me having new friends, new relations, new loves. She makes me too to be a friend-lover who hold an image about self-other strongly that I keep renewing without repeating what love is.

the flow of time often destructs a lover’s images. they slip over and fall into a crack wide enough that they called for a break. so broken those images, so deeply they fall and their love keeps going, making events, walking through.

I keep “mikirin cinta-cintaan” like it’s the most important thing of my being as a person, a historian, an intellectual, a person (yes this is repetition). “How to be a better thinker?” And so I feel. A lot. It’s tiring. Thus I detach. Feeling the detachment, also the want and affection. We are broken and broke. An ordinary intimate day of making pesto sauce at home is not a whole. A fraction always matters but not at all define. I keep mikirin cinta-cintaan and I keep doing cinta-cintaan, to sustain love out of the world’s impossibility, through an empty space where we—my beloveds and I—are happening.

sayangku, we are not events made out of and make meanings. we don’t have to have meanings. we unfold.