April

Someone brought you into this world and no one has yet taken you out of it. That’s a good start.

And there will always be the movies in which the protagonist meets a handsome stranger in a coffee shop, or on the subway, or even on a park bench while reading a book during the middle of the summer, and they’ll go home together almost immediately. They’ll sleep together in her giant loft above Manhattan and in the morning he’ll make her pancakes in bed and when he promises to call her, he really will end up calling her.

But the truth is, in real life it’s rarely ever like that. You have to stop waiting for them to call back. You have to stop wishing you had the power of telepathy so you could send them all your most intimate thoughts; you have to stop mixing chocolate chips into the pancake batter because you know it’s their favorite, even when it isn’t yours. The more time you spend wishing, and wanting, and pining, the less time you have for the world, who already loves you by virtue of letting you exist inside its arms.

You think you have a right to self-pity? How do you think the moon feels knowing it’s not the center of the universe? This, this feeling unloved, this isn’t your undoing. It’s your becoming.

Someone else can love you as hard as they hate themselves, or hate you as hard as they love themselves. Newton said that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. That means that for every person who doesn’t love you, there’s an equal number who do love you. But they don’t cancel each other out. They don’t cancel each other out because some of the people who don’t love you have never met you. They’ve never met you in their lives, and maybe if they did, maybe if they met you on that park bench or at the coffee shop or on the subway, they would love you. They’d fall for you. They’d want you in the morning, in the middle of the afternoon, at night, with all your bedhead, your acne, the raspy cough you get when you have a cold, with the way you snore, even the way you breathe.

And even if you never meet any of these beautiful, mysterious, aching strangers who have fallen for you, maybe they fell in love with the mere sight of you crossing the street, or ordering a croissant, something so simple, yet so revealing of your ability to be loved.

Focus on: Anushka Blommers & Niels Schumm