hanif abdurraqib via his instagram stories
text ID: will answer, let’s say between 3 and 9, across a range of topics. What’s your favourite thing about being in love? well, for me, at my luckiest, love has been a transformation of architecture(s,) both internal and external. Which, for me, means that I most delight in the way sounds and shapes and colors of the world that I’ve always understood in a single way all begin to bend towards a new understanding, informed by or propelled by loving another person. When we say “this song now reminds me of ___” for example, what actually is being said is “you have moved into the world of this song, I have welcomed it, and it is a different song now.” And internally, I think being loved well provides opportunity for a sort of internal renovation. The city of yourself, built/arranged/maintained by you and for you still gets to be yours, but the very act of someone being curious about its roads & buildings & whatnot might make you wonder about the possibilities within it that you didn’t see before.
I think platonic love, romantic love, familial love, all of it is very lucky because it is actually not promised, to any of us. And there’s a whole lotta fucking people in the world, and the vast, vast majority of them will not only never love you, but also not know you exist. The better money is on the loneliness. And so, knowing this, opening oneself up to the possibility of that work of seeking, knowing that heartbreak is a possible outcome, is brave. And knowing THAT, a person finding another person who understands them in a full, wholly unique way feels miraculous to me, given the odds. So I guess the short answer is that my favorite thing is being in the midst of a miracle which acts against what the odds say.
