FIELD NOTES: On Love

On jumping, landing, and the luggage you didn't declare.

I’ve written about a lot of things. Escalators. Gyms. Trees that made me fall.

I haven’t written about love. Until now.

It’s there, in the margins. The Paris apartment. A succulent sailing over a railing. Soil on the steps nobody cleaned for days. One floor down, a divorce party. I documented both, filed them, moved on.

But here’s what I haven’t said: the reason I’m on this planet at all is because something ended. I submitted the relocation request forty-eight hours after it did. There’s a particular kind of desperation in certain paperwork that even IRD bureaucrats can read between the lines. They approved it fast.

I arrived. The sky was a good shade of blue. The green here is very alive. I noticed this for approximately six minutes before remembering why I’d come, and that I’d brought everything with me. All of it. The whole history, in luggage I hadn’t declared.

Heartbreak, it turns out, doesn’t care about which planet you’re on. It travels well. It clears customs without issue and unpacks itself even before you do.

---

My therapist said something once that I made a mental note immediately.

"The wound isn't there to remind you that you were wrong. It's there to remind you what you went through."

She also said: “Accidents happen. Have you ever seen a car without a scratch?”

I filed it under: things that are true, funny and also difficult at the same time.

---

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about.

Forming a bond requires a very specific kind of recklessness.

You open yourself. You show it to someone. And in the same moment you do, you understand: they now have the coordinates. They can pinpoint where the soft parts are. And one day, if things go wrong, whether they mean to or not, they can use them. Sometimes by a little mean comment on where it hurts the most. Sometimes by making you question your own self-worth. Or just by leaving.

You know this going in.

Not the first time though. The first time you fall for someone, you don’t know what’s coming. You dive in, as the hopeless romantic you are. By the tenth time, you do know. And the eleventh asks more of you than the first ever did. Not because the feeling is less. Because this time you know exactly what you’re risking.

The only way to not get hurt is to not open anything. Which technically works. But a closed thing in a dark place isn’t protection. It's still loss. Only difference is you don't want to name it, yet you try to explain it by making comparisons about scratches on your car.

So you stand at the edge. You look down. You know exactly what falling feels like because you’ve done it before, and the landing was not always soft. And you jump anyway, telling yourself maybe, maybe this time it will be cream and warmth and something that holds.

Maybe it will be. You can’t know until you’ve jumped.

I don’t know if that’s optimism. It feels much more structural. Closer to whatever makes any of us keep going.

Maybe this is just what courage looks like. Jumping anyway.

Because loving is for the brave.

---

I’ve been on this planet long enough to know something I didn’t when I arrived.

I stayed because the IRD hasn’t reassigned me, true. But something else started pulling too. Not a person, not one thing. To be honest, it’s the whole thing. This place and the people in it, and the way they keep trying despite everything they know about how it can end.

I think I love this planet and some of the people on it too.

I’m saying it here because saying it quietly, in a field note, to people reading from somewhere I can’t see, feels like the right amount of courage for today.

— Kira

P.S. The relocation helped. Not in the way I thought it would. But it did.