Edited by Alloe Mak, Oliver Francis Baker, and Annika Budhwani
When I began to love her, I folded the crumpled chopstick wrappers that sat idle on our dinner table and crafted two paper rings. It was too early to tell her, but the words teased at the creases in my lips, daring me to say something—anything. She knew it too. The spring air of Los Angeles flurried between us as I slipped one on her left hand, our friends poking fun at the romance of it all. I believed, then, with everything I had, that I saw a lifetime in her eyes.
A year and some months later, she gave the rings back to me. The paper unravelled in the palm of my hand as I cried.
She asked me to keep them. That was the last time we spoke.
The next morning, I winced as the comically large door of room 101 slammed shut behind me. I rushed in late, as always, to my 10:00 AM Shakespeare lecture. My professor’s voice didn’t falter for a second.
Cordelia is a character in the Shakespearean tragedy, King Lear, and is her father’s favourite daughter. At the beginning of the play, Lear, feeling the weight of age in his bones, wishes to divide his opulent kingdom between his three daughters—Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia. To do so, he poses a love test. He asks each of his girls to quantify the extent of their love for him, and in return, he will allocate their share of the nation. While Goneril and Regan express their love for him in computable, measurable manners, comparing their affections to the strength of millions of undying armies and thousands of lifetimes spanning backwards and forwards, Cordelia cannot.
She says, “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your majesty/ According to my bond; no more nor less.” Lear resents this. Like many, he can only understand the gravity of love when it is quantified—expressed in lifetimes, armies, or other grand, physical aggregates, paralleling his obsession with growing his empire and accumulating wealth. However, Cordelia regards love as something irreplaceable and infinite in its own right, even if it only exists in the millisecond beat of a butterfly’s wings.
This fundamental misalignment between Cordelia and her father leads to both of their downfalls and ultimate deaths. It is only as Lear holds his daughter’s lifeless body, repeating the word, “never, never, never, never, never” five times, that he can understand. No matter how many times he says it, the word is granted no more weight. Cordelia is gone. She will never be replaced, not by a million ships or by hundreds of alternate lifetimes.
As the clock ticked to the expiry of our class, my lecturer paused—silence suspended in the air. She spoke her final line before our campanile bells chimed, ending the lesson with the words, “The singularity of love is the infinity of now.”
I felt like I was breathing for the first time in an hour—maybe for the first time in months. I didn’t truly understand what she meant then, but the line lingered in the forefront of my mind, daring me to grapple with it.
Since I’ve returned to Toronto for the summer, I’ve run into some exes. Maybe it’s something in the air, in the warm wind wafting in through my open bedroom windows at 1:43 AM, or the sweet taste of humidity after May’s showers, but I don’t think I’ve disliked it. Actually, it’s been quite romantic.
I spent my twentieth birthday in a nightclub with my closest friends, one of whom just happens to be my high school ex-boyfriend. As the evening went on and I lost all feeling in my cheeks and the floor fell away beneath my heels, he lent me his shoulder to lean on. The orange light flashed behind him, and smoke billowed through the crowd of bodies—for a moment, everything felt familiar. I told him, “Romance, maybe it’s not my thing.”
He laughed and said, “Me neither.”
“But you—I loved you once. You and I were good.” I said, my words escaping my parted lips before I had a chance to think again. I could’ve sworn I saw the heads of our old friends turn, their eyes wide and mouths slipping into shocked laughter. They may have been embarrassed for me, thinking I would regret my liquid courage in the morning. I had to laugh, too.
“When I was packing my shit and moving out of my apartment back in Berkeley, I found that book you made me. Remember? The one you made for my eighteenth birthday with the pink cover and print polaroids and pencil drawings?” I said, relishing his knowing laugh. “My little read it, and she started crying. She told me that it was so wonderful to know that I had been loved like that, even before she knew me. She told me I deserved it.” I paused. “She’s the best.”
“I think we were good, too.” He said, his voice raised over the music. “I was going through my old stuff when I got home, and I found that jar of hearts you made me, y’know, with the 100 reasons why you loved me.” He smiled, continuing, “And the dragon mug you painted. And the Harry Potter socks.”
I cooed, sentimental as always. He admitted, “I didn’t really know what to do with them. But I keep them tucked in a closet somewhere.”
“You should keep them. They’re yours.” I replied.
I hope he knew what I meant.
The next night, I attended a house party in the building where I lost my virginity. And the boy I lost it to happened to be in attendance.
The amber light reflected off the beer in my hand as the party’s chatter engulfed me in the kitchen. When I saw him approach, a small smile spread across his face.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I replied, leaning in for a hug. “It’s been a while. Two—three years maybe?”
He nodded in acknowledgement, and the silence lingered between us for a moment, my lips pursed and eyes flitting between his hair and deepened dimples. Maybe it was awkward. I don’t think it was.
“I see your friends around school all the time.” He said, breaking the tension.
I laughed. “Yeah, they tell me. It’s weird all of my friends went to the same university, right?”
“Yeah,” he said, lifting one hand behind his ear, a nervous tick. “I never really say hi.”
“Why? You all know each other.”
“I don’t know, maybe it’s a bit awkward—I don’t really know what they think of me now, or if there’s any bad blood, or anything.”
I shook my head. “No, no bad blood. We’re old friends, right? History happened upstairs.” I said, pointing up the staircase. It made him laugh.
“But it’s all water under the bridge. We were kids.”
We talked a little more, catching up on work and school, and how strange it was to see all the same people we used to know in the same house we spent every summer in, celebrating the passage of another year. It was small and sweet, and nowhere near as terrifying as I would have thought at fifteen.
Despite the simple knowing that our lives have diverged in completely different directions, I can’t help but feel like he still has a small part of me tucked in his back pocket, my being tied to his with an invisible string that stretches endlessly across cities and states. It doesn’t mean I’ll ever see him again. I don’t feel any less of myself because of it. It only exists in its own singularity, a momentary reminder of the love that once ebbed in the palm of my hand.
Earlier today, I was talking with my mom as we walked to Costco, and I told her about a fresh, potential crush on a possible new girl. She went silent, telling me I had just placed another rock upon her beating heart, one she thought had been lifted since I broke up with my ex. I don’t think she’s ever fully understood my sexuality—that it wasn’t an on-off thing, an experiment since discarded. I don’t think she has accepted it.
She said, “You like both. You have loved men before. You don’t have to choose the hard thing.”
“Is it worth it to you? Think about your wedding—how will you explain to your grandparents? To your father?” She continued. She asked me to quantify my love for her, for our family, our tradition, and social grace.
Truth be told, I can’t quite imagine loving anything more than I love my mother. She is kind, gentle, and possesses more grace in the corner of her crinkling eyes than most people could ever dream of having in their entire lifetimes. I see it in her—the life that she left behind so I could have this one—a life that is charmed, full of light and meadows and glamour. I want nothing more than to repay her kindness, to give her everything she has ever wanted one day: grandchildren, a big white wedding, and more money than she’ll know what to do with.
I can’t help but think that my mother has a point. What a waste it would be to fuck up this perfectly good life, to fuck up everything I have built for myself, for one thing. What a waste it would be to love a woman.
But as hard as I try, I, like Cordelia, can only love her the way a faithful child loves her mother, and my desire for women, their tenderness, sharp intellect, and unequivocal light, stays an entirely separate entity.
I’ve always loved hard. I think I’ve fallen in love with every person I’ve ever met, at least a little bit. Even when I re-encounter my old flames and we are so different that I am unable to remember how we were ever together, I scroll through my thousands of pages of writing, and it feels as if I am there again. My writing exists as proof that the love was there—that it was real, sharp, clear, and vulnerable.
The way I understand love is as follows: all the love I have ever given anyone is theirs to keep forever. No matter what happens between us, or whatever amount of time passes, it is yours. Like my writing, like Shakespeare’s plays, it is immortalized—infinite. I cannot weigh one love over another.
I’ll admit, it’s terrifying to conceptualize love in this way. To acknowledge its existence even in the face of all of this suffering—the pain, the guilt, the negotiation—it feels like it isn’t worth it when it all blows over, when it doesn’t materialize into a happily ever after. It’s easy for it to feel like love wasted. But when I crack open my orange shoebox of keepsakes and leaf through the paper rings and love letters and birthday cards, all I feel is lucky.
Although queerness often feels like a sentence, it is a privilege in many ways. It has forced me to cherish the love that heteronormativity often takes for granted, the freedom to devote myself to a love that does not necessitate a forever. Queerness has demanded an alternative innovation. To love someone could never be a waste, not even a little bit.
It is singular. It is infinite. And that is more than enough for me.
