I’ve been thinking about this issue recently, which is what Love is and how long does it stay in your life?
It seems to be me that it’s a choice. I never thought before that Love could be a choice, because of the influence of German Romanticism, as if it had to be endless and only end with Death.
I used to feel this way as well. That all good relationships ended with Death, and that Death had to be where they all ended.
I have constantly been a property. That’s how it felt when I was growing up.
Also I feel like so much of my life was surrounded by the Romantic idea of Death, and so much of it can be a result of the way that my aunts and uncles, my father’s generation, were brought up, and the things and connections that they idealized, which were largely artistic. In some ways I follow this path too, mostly following the way and direction that Art takes me, whether I like it or not.
I feel like, with this way, what families are doing are trauma-bonding, including picking apart each other’s faults. It feels sometimes like we are actually a family of losers, but that no one would admit to it.
So I’ve had to learn to love myself anew, completely wholly, as I am. I have probably spent the most money on myself since the beginning of 2015, where something just snapped and I went to India.
And so I realised. What was good enough for my grandma was no longer good enough for me.
Back to this picture in Varanasi, or Benares, the death capital of India – where the cremations of Hindus happen. Sitting next to me is my friend Natasha, who’s binary like me, a Lebanese Dutch woman, who later married a Malaysian Sikh man.