From a Dry January Lunch Date, to Mexico 🇲🇽

On love poems, adventure, and vulnerability.

Here’s my 2024 update:

I’m off to Mexico for a few weeks with a French man I met on Hinge.

Then I’ll spend March in California, from a 40th birthday party in Sonoma with my New Orleans crew, to a belated wedding congratulations for Claire in Santa Cruz, to dog-sitting and seeing old friends in San Luis Obispo, and ending with visiting family in Laguna Beach and San Diego.

Incredibly, I haven’t been to California—where I was born and raised, and where my dad and sister live—since Thanksgiving 2021.

And more incredibly, I met this lovely 49-year-old French guy who lived in L.A. for decades and now lives in Tahoe. I was doing a dry January, so we had a 3-hour lunch at the Hoxton, and he came to my neighborhood the next morning for a 3-hour breakfast before hopping in a taxi to the airport.

We’ve talked on the phone every day since—sometimes for two hours!

I love this feeling. Limerence, a crush, infatuation, projection: call it what you will, but the thing I like most is how we don’t grow out of it. Or how I never get so cynical about love that I stop welcoming these feelings, this wild hope.

Brandi and I were texting on WhatsApp about these feelings of early excitement, and how eventually there is a change, a return to reality. How we’ve all developed tools to keep ourselves safe: distance, walls, checklists, rules, standards, expectations. We just don’t want to be hurt, rightfully so. I said it’s like walking a tightrope.

You might slip. You might come across as too eager, or too aloof. Too available, or too distant. So, you walk the tightrope.

Or, worse, you could be wrong! You might have over-estimated one another.

He and I could be investing hours in delightful and teenager-ish (honestly, it’s amazing to feel this young again) daily phone calls only to find out, in Quintana Roo, that something doesn’t click. I’m sure we’d both be bummed if that happened, despite the very real obstacle of loving—and living in—each other’s countries more than our own.

We’ll call him Lucien (after the main character in Balzac’s series La Comédie Humaine; his request). I have his blessing (actually, encouragement!) to write about our adventure “in the present tense,” rather than looking backwards like I tend to do. I generally need to know how the story ends before I can transform emotions into art. But I also realize my pattern: searching, hope, excitement, attempt toward love, the end of love (or shift into friendship), poems!

I don’t think I’ve written an actual love poem in my life. I mean that everything I write is after the fact, guarded, slightly bitter, hinging on the return to independence, agency, self-sufficiency.

Perhaps the most honest love poem I ever wrote is this song from 2011. My very talented friend Ben Shea recorded it, played the music, and mixed it.

It’s vulnerable to share an old piece of art with you—not even my genre, no less! (Though I did spend a year trying to write country songs in Nashville, and wrote Cuntry instead. I used to have a SoundCloud but the high school boys I taught in New Orleans would randomly play my songs just to embarrass me, so I took it down.)

It’s a good practice, vulnerability. To allow yourself to feel excited about someone or something, to lean into the fear, projections, a vision of the future—all of this requires vulnerability. And I am good at this aspect of vulnerability. But I am not good at the actual, deep-down part where you say: “I do want to find love, partnership; I do want the story of my searching to end, to find something deeply enriching on the other side of being endlessly single.” The part where you remove your armor.

I’ve never written a love poem like that. A poem without a hint of cynicism.

Maybe songs are better for that kind of thing. My uncle, for instance—a Nashville songwriter—wrote one of the best. (I also truly believe that, even when using dating apps, people still seem to appear “out of the blue, clear sky.”)

In related news, I’m looking for a poem appropriate for Argerie’s wedding in December. The bar is very high. I don’t plan on writing one, because gosh what a challenge! But everything about it has to be perfect, from the title to the author to the use of pronouns. It needs to be expansive, capturing the way love opens us up to new adventures, new patterns, new stories. Suggestions are welcome!

This Anne Carson poem gets close. But the title is too sad for a wedding.

Good luck, little dreamers, you. Little lovers with our little toolkits. Fixing something. Trying to give someone the whole world.

That’s how I hope it is, for me, and for you. Also to make art out of it, which it seems to me is the real work, for some of us.

(And which, Marie reminded me today, is what I need to do in Mexico. Write. Start a new project. Experiment.)

Anyway, this isn’t about love. This is about the part where you meet someone and you share two meals but you don’t have drinks, there’s no cocktail or wine leading you down the path to thinking there’s something here, something effervescent that you can’t quite pinpoint, a fluttery feeling, and five weeks later you’re on a plane to find out.