Day 1

The rows of dominoes that string the world together are tumbling onto one another. Airports are snapping shut, distance is reiterated and a seismic shift is underway. Meaning has become elastic as the unknown stretches in every direction.

I start to taste the meaning of words as they are uttered out loud. I wonder if this is a form of dissociation wrought by the pandemic. Have I always been able to feel the textures of phrases? Is this how my body responds to fear?

(I think of asking you if you can taste words too.)

Day 6

When people say to me, I love you, I say, what does that even mean?

I remember seeing a post-it slapped onto the wall of my Creative Writing teacher’s home that said, meaning is never monogamous. This is true of love, which the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘an intense feeling of deep affection,’ but also as ‘a formula for ending an affectionate letter’ and ‘a score of zero; nil.’

It is evident to me that love is not a monolith; it is some sort of an enchanted mirror that reflects back something different to every observer. Yet, in recurring fits of absurdity, we abide by the convention of saying ‘I love you’, as though we are all staring at the same hallowed imagery of a universal lovescape.

Day 14

As the hours in lockdown pass by with a bovine placidity, I find myself more attuned to the weight of every word that passes through my lips. The word ‘quarantine’ falls out with a dull thud, sterile and unbecoming. ‘Waiting’ has a delectable urgency to it, it rolls out with a flourish, bittersweet on the tongue. There is a creamy, warm solidity to ‘literature’, four syllables of woody notes and musky tones.

‘Love’ has started to sound like a word from a dead language, hollow and arcane. I toy with the intonation in various failed attempts to make sense of it. LOVE. love. Love. Love. I rip into it, hoping semantics will come to my rescue where phonetics have failed.

Day 20

As ‘isolation’ reveals its malignant flavour and leaden heaviness, I start to conflate it with ‘separation,’ which is more jagged and pronounced. I feel myself take leave of my body over and over again, picking up the shedded skin of each iteration of the word and twirling it between my fingers, unable to arrive at something solid.

Day 25

I ask several people that I ‘love’ to tell me what the proverbial enchanted mirror reflects back to them. What does love look like to you? What does it sound like? Does it have a flavour? What is the vehicle of its transference?

I’m interested in the poetics of expression, I tell them.

Day 31

The responses come in slowly, stacking themselves on top of one another like piles of firewood until patterns start to emerge. I gather more and more visions and versions of love until my pockets bulge. I empty them onto a grassy field as spires of memory rise from the ground.

Day 34

I learn that love takes on many forms and that sometimes it can be a gesture, like dirty drains cleaned out of turn, the last piece of pizza surrendered with a smile, a postcard shot off even though all international postal services have been suspended due to a global pandemic.

Day 39

I am told that love is delivered through attention, that it is listening and remembering. I know a girl with a warm, toothy smile who rose with the winter sun in her airy city centre dwellings and tiptoed to the kitchen to leave a note of encouragement for her flatmate who was bracing herself for a hard conversation at work.

I know not one, but two Parisians whose expressions coalesce with this notion of love. One of whom keeps lists of items mentioned by loved ones in an offhand way so she can surprise them on their birthdays. Leaning against her almirah the first time I went to her hilltop house, I remember fingering the spine of a tattered paperback and flipping through its pages with intent. On my twenty-fifth birthday, I received a shiny new copy of the same book, Elephants on Acid, gift-wrapped in newspaper.

The second Parisian ardently rearranges a corner of the universe for you by setting up a speaker that softly emanates the tunes of Philippe Jarousky during tea time so that your evenings of contemplation are tinged with nostalgia. This kind of love looks at space that is unwitting and blank and momentarily claims a piece of it for you. It is a gentle material conquest in service of your attention, one that plainly says, look, there was nothing here before, but now this bed is full of pink feathers and it is all for you!

Day 43

Others tell me that love is quite the opposite, that it is best served without pomp and fanfare. A silent prayer before bedtime, an affirmation cast into a starstruck sky for a struggling friend, an act of service for someone who will never know that it was your sleight of hand that led to their joy.

(I name a baby turtle after you and sing your favourite songs to the potted succulents I have started to grow. I decide not to tell you this but hold love’s secret close to my chest. I want to know if you have such secrets too.)

Day 50

As the death toll rises and world systems collapse, I am told about love as a creative enterprise. Art, which often blurs in and out of meaning, feels like the only thing that is still capable of bearing the weight of the world. I hear from a burly Argentinian man with a heart softer than a rosebud, whose words reek of appreciation for all that exists. He catches the day’s blessings into a funnel and concentrates them on those he loves. In the din of pots and pans, his hands mould ingredients into warm meals doused with care, hours spent refining a medley of flavours suited to your palate alone.

I hear from a witch, the wildest woman alive, who etches charcoal onto cloth to conduct a devoted study of the faces she loves. The fragile and intuitive dance of her portraiture examines every millimetre of your countenance as you fall in and out of being with every line, every smudge. Suddenly, life is breathed into a monochromatic mass as your features emerge. An ode to a memory that has taken on mostly sepia hues, it seems that love can sometimes be the act of preservation.

Day 58

Somewhere in the lull, I have taken to playing games and making quizzes for my friends. With teacups full of amber intoxicants, we toast virtually to the historical moment we have found ourselves in. We discuss plots for future films, short story ideas and the many ways in which life will never be the same again. Little do they know that I am no longer tethered to my body, that the absence of touch has made me a wraith. Time contracts and paces without my noticing. Everything has taken on an abstract form - the world has become an anfractuous bricolage of shapes, structures, memories and turbulence. My gaze is a faraway one, zoomed out, out, and away. The sunshine and sugar fuel the frequent rushes of serotonin through my brain but I do not have anyone in my midst to pour love into. And so I drift further and further out, meticulously taking notes, watching as the wretched world carries on. I am a mere bystander in the cataclysm.

Day 63

The enchanted mirror has proven to be bountiful. Sensitive to refraction, it offers sublime distortions to all those who gaze into it. I am told that love is about giving, while others tune into the slight semantic difference and maintain that actually, love is about sharing. Dark hair cropped close to her skull, there is a coastal born seductress who passes on seashell, amethyst, pretty notebook, fossil, voice note, poem, bookshelf, sentiment, eyelash, feather, probiotic elixir to those whose lives have tenderly twined with hers, as she formulates: anything given to another with love becomes a talisman.

(I make a compilation of the things we could call talismans: images of views from our state mandated walks, screenshots of dictionary definitions that are instantly dissolved into our parlance, drunken phone calls that exalt the promise of tomorrow, the promise of tomorrow, there will be a tomorrow and we will partake in it, I promise.)

Day 66

Time, turned into a purchase under capitalism, is freely given away to those we love. You might sit on your sister’s lap like a home grown blanket while she cries out her teenage angst, while you, ten years older, no longer remember the volumes of woes buried into your sinew in the first quarter of your life. But you give her your time and your acceptance, gifts she is not too young to know.

Adjacent but not analogous to this rendition, there is a world of sharing in which films remain unwatched, lists of books are created, poems are read to one another as sunlight dances in the first floor balcony and articles about refugees and sewing and organic produce are exchanged over messenger. In love, we try to gently coerce someone into our world while we gingerly step into theirs.

There is a girl with the blackest eyes who sits at the foot of her father’s bed, reading out from a list of personalised fun facts, an act of sharing that says, I don’t understand always, but I accept your deafening silence. At the best of times, love is a crossover episode, a fusion of two separate but symbiotic stories merging briefly, where the dialogue denounces the fiction of isolation.

(Once I start to look at it this way, distance feels more manageable. Instead of receding into my head, I pick up the phone and call you to discuss a podcast and check on your progress with the script.)

Day 72

I find my body to be easier to inhabit when I zoom in rather than out. I have taken to singing out loud while the kettle boils steadily, I dance with my foster puppy and I have started to run up the south side of the hill each morning. There is meaning to be made despite all this, I tell myself, emptiness can be a gift if you pour yourself into it.

(I no longer find the blank page daunting. I start writing you this letter.)

Day 79

I learn that at some level, love is about who is best able to reside in your subconscious. The firing of neurons that activates your associative memory so that all kinds of hats and camper vans and dictionaries remind you of a specific someone and you find yourself smiling as you chance upon these objects.

(Instead of trying to subvert attachment, I allow the clutter of the world to transport you to me, even if it is only for a split second.)

I realise that love can be understood as the complex psychological process that helps us orient each other in a world that is made of so many objects and moments and power structures. Much like how watermelons remind me of my grandfather who would remove each individual seed from the crescents he chopped, and how shopping malls remind me of my oldest friend and our teenage dalliances with commodity fetishism - love is a series of words connected to memories that are overlaid by metaphors, called to attention even when we don’t see them coming. Love, it seems, happens entirely outside of our control.

Day 84

There is a boy with a very sweet tooth, whose mother measured love in spoonfuls of sugar. He thinks of her every time he bites into a yellow ladoo that melts in his mouth.

Love is compliments on your hair, your turn of phrase, the way you deftly diffused an argument between your parents. It is an affectionate head scratch as you walk past someone, a pair of arms encircling your waist as you prepare breakfast, the familiar tangle of limbs at the far end of the couch. It is forehead kisses from father to daughter, swift embraces at the pub, and the tasty friction of skin on sultry nights that pass too quickly.

Day 91

There is a lightness to love when it seeks to create abundance. There is a man, dimpled and devious, who has made a study of laughter cascading from the mouths of those he loves. His mind whirs as he investigates what makes you giggle, what gives you a wry smile and what makes you laugh uncontrollably, all teeth on show and struggling to breathe.

(Laughter can make distances seem smaller as utterances from one island find their way to another, two hearts beating to the gleeful synchronicity of each other’s comical waywardness. But I know you know this already.)

Day 93

I long for the physical lightness of love that comes about when friends, lovers, strangers dance together in dimly lit rooms, coming undone to rhythms that transcend the need for words or gestures, when love is simply a celebration of aliveness, an assertion of here, now and with you.

Day 96

The experiment has made me think that perhaps the word love is archaic.

The corpus of clauses that can predicate a sentence that starts with ‘love is…’ is inexhaustible. I fear that every I love you cast into the space between us is an empty token of emotion, a poor placeholder for what I’m actually trying to say.

(Increasingly so, I want to tell you that I can’t stop thinking about you when I see the curlicue of sunset clouds sweeping the sky. Or that this video about the Pareto Principle reminded me of you. Or that I wrote a haiku one Sunday afternoon for every ‘word of the day’ you threw my way. These confessions carry weight in a way that a triad of syllables never could.)

I had a lover once who learned how to make all my favourite curries, fixed my shoes when they broke and asked me not to sleep with other people. I said no, but I held him when the seams of reality ruptured in his labyrinthine mind and clasped his hand when we walked so he could stay tethered to his body. Eventually we parted ways because the things crucial to us in love were incongruent. He would have taken a bullet for me, but could not accept an unconventional romance. I would have followed him to the end of the world, but not if he asked me to. And yet, we exchanged the three words whose semantic girth exceeds any other, unaware of the discrepancies in what we were saying.

A phrase loses meaning when it is repeated so often, so much so that you assume that everyone means the same thing when they say it, like have a lovely day, or the grass is greener on the other side. The same slew of syllables could roll off our tongues even when we mean completely different things. I lacked the impulse to be vulnerable in my younger days, using I love you as a scapegoat. The culturally acceptable clause is easier to extend than a version of vulnerability that is attuned to you and who you love.

Day 100

In the midst of a global slowdown, ‘transcendence’ is a warm and honeyed elixir at the tip of my tongue, threatening to spread through my barely-there body in a protracted wave. I have the urge to rise above things, above unhealthy patterns, above diluted phraseology and craven prose. I will stop picking at my scabs, I will not raze down my hair with kitchen scissors to punish myself with bangs, I will stop intellectualising my emotions. I will use my words the way a child would.

As a declaration, I love you will always have a central place in the linguistic patchwork of our feelings. It suggests a direction with a careless swing of the hands. But it does not tell you how to get where you seek to go, or what lies along the way.

I reach my own conclusions. I say, love is almost a pastiche of itself. I say, love is a postmodern device that encompasses everything without saying anything. I say, love is a trellis on which things can grow.

A cursory reading of this text alone makes it obvious that I have not captured even a fraction of all the things people mean when they say I love you and the ways in which they express it.

It seems logical then, to privilege expressions that extract the honest crop of our feelings. I love you is magnanimous and must never go out of fashion, but it cannot carry us all the way.

(I love you is defunct, I say to you, let’s try something else.)