to live is to love and lose again and again and again (filmstack inspo challenge #182 💌 )

My favorite poem about longing gives you permission to feel deeply today.

Hi friends, my lovelies, my darlings, my sweethearts, come sit in a ❤️ circle with me.

You have been hearing a lot from me lately, but I can’t help it. I’m absolutely enamored with the FilmStack Inspiration Challenge series, started by the icon that is Ted Hope and now coordinated by the great Donny Broussard & Avi Setton. Hearing people I admire share something that inspires them each day has been the antidote to my cynicism. The prompt is simple: what inspires you? It doesn’t have to be about film. It doesn’t have to be about anything. It just has to be true.

I signed up to contribute a piece for Valentine’s Day, and the permission structure of the holiday—this one day where we’re allowed to be earnest about desire—made me think about how we used to talk about longing versus how we talk about it now. We’ve gotten so good at undercutting everything before anyone else can do it for us. The piece of inspiration I’m highlighting in this issue was big in an era when you could still talk about heartbreak like a natural disaster and people would just let you mean it.

Too much setup, that’s the problem. I never remember to undercut my own enthusiasm! But anyway, here’s Andrea Gibson’s “Photograph,” which I haven’t thought about in a decade. Happy Valentine’s Day.

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My friend showed me Andrea Gibson’s “Photograph” on her laptop in her room in 2013 and I told her I had to pee. I went to the bathroom in the basement that nobody used because the door didn’t lock properly and you had to hold it shut with your foot, and I watched the poem again on my phone with my face so close to the screen I could see the pixels. Gibson standing under stage lights in some community center somewhere, their voice doing this thing on “I’ve been missing you like crazy” where it sounded like they were about to cry but hadn’t yet. I watched it four times. Went back upstairs. My friend asked if I was okay and I said yeah totally and we talked about something else.

Tumblr in the early 2010s was a whole ecosystem built for art like this. You’d reblog Andrea Gibson between the Abramović crying photos and those pictures of people kissing in the rain and pretend you were building an aesthetic when really you were building a permission structure. A way to feel gigantic things without anyone calling you dramatic. Spoken word poetry was perfect for this because the form gave you cover—you weren’t being ridiculous about a breakup, you were engaging with Art. It made “I miss you<3” into something you could say out loud. It was embarrassing and beautiful and the exact opposite of how anyone talks about love now, where you have to minimize every feeling before someone else does it for you.

I went a decade without thinking about this poem. Tuesday morning I was walking down Chiswick High Road thinking about whether we had almond milk, whether I needed eggs, the quality of the winter light coming in low and golden under the cloud cover like a film from the seventies. I step into Waitrose, I buy the things, and as I step out, the security guy tells me: “Wish you well, love”. A bit much, I thought, but I nodded politely. In the spur of the moment, my brain delivered “Photograph” back to me complete. Not the first line floating up as memory—the entire text, every metaphor in sequence, Gibson’s exact inflection on “moons love the planets they circle around,” the pause before “But I wish you well” all three minutes of it performed inside my skull while I stared at the Valentine’s roses in their plastic sleeves and the lilies that smell like funeral homes and small churches.

I must have made a weird face because he asked if I was alright.

I said yes and walked home and put my keys in the ceramic dish by the door (Anthropologie, three years ago, too expensive, bought it anyway) and sat at my desk and opened my laptop to check one line—just one line, the bit about the snow falling in the glow of a street light—to see if I’d remembered it correctly.

Google autofilled “Andrea Gibson death” before I finished typing.

They died in July. Ovarian cancer. Their wife Meg wrote that Andrea had been running a newsletter called Things That Don't Suck here on Substack documenting beauty while dying. That they wanted the work to continue after they were gone because the work was never about them—it was about giving other people permission.

You’ll never hear anything like Andrea’s voice. You will feel seen and understood, as I think many people do when they discover their favorite artists for the first time. You will learn how to grieve a love that never fully belonged to you, a love that had strayed too far away to ever come home. How crazy that the very first time I heard the line, “I wish you well / I wish you my very very best,” I knew that it wouldn’t be the last time I’d need to hear it. I wish I could have told Andrea that. Or at least that I would need them to stick around for a decade longer so they could tell me, over and over. Sometimes I still need to hear it, a reminder to accept, a prayer to the inevitable.

Today, “Photograph” is all about absence. It’s a poem about missing someone, a poem about love, moving into memory. It’s a poem about longing, about death, about everything that makes its way into the cracks of the mundane.

It is about the specific torture of wanting good things for someone who's not in your life anymore. Hoping they quit smoking even though you'll never know if they did. Wishing their lungs are open even though you can't hear them breathing. Maintaining this tenderness for someone who's become hypothetical.

It's about how being changed by love—any love—matters more than whether that love lasts. "I'm still time zones away from who I was the day before we met." That line used to feel like loss. Now it feels like lived-in proof.

But today, it mostly feels like a eulogy to Andrea’s own life. It makes sense to me that one of Andrea’s last conscious acts was to write, “I fucking loved my life.” Andrea spent their final days surrounded by exes, people they’d loved and stopped loving and loved differently after. I love this image, of finally, fully accepting that there is no single way to love and be loved. It reminds me of something I thought about a lot while I was in my last serious relationship — that the people we love always find their way out into the world, that the only thing we can control is how they move through our hearts.

I'm sharing this poem on Valentine's Day because I think it means something about the love we keep and the love that keeps us, about what we think we've successfully defended ourselves against and what's still in there waiting maintained in perfect condition ready to wreck us when we're just trying to buy almond milk.

I want to invite us to listen to Andrea. I want to encourage you to listen and to be held by their words, the way I was all day back on my Tumblr days. To hear them at that big, aching moment when the world was almost completely over for them. To hear them at the moment when all that mattered was the love they had for their life.

What doesn’t suck about being alive?

I also want to remind you that love is a wild, bizarre, strange, and beautiful thing. That whatever kind of love you hold, or have held, or will hold is worthy of all the space you give it. I want to remind you that love does not follow the rules or listen to the laws put in place by those who do not truly understand it. I want to remind you that you are so very loved. I want to remind you to love your life. Today, tomorrow, and all the days after that. I want to remind you that there’s always room for more joy. I want to remind you that all you have to do is listen.

So listen, listener. Listen.

Listen to Andrea Gibson’s “Photograph”.

Listen. Listen. Listen.

Photograph

I wish I was a photograph
tucked into the corners of your wallet
I wish I was a photograph
you carried like a future in your back pocket
I wish I was that face you show to strangers
when they ask you where you come from
I wish I was that someone that you come from
every time you get there
And when you get there
I wish I was that someone who got phone calls
And postcards saying
Wish you were here

I wish you were here
Autumn is the hardest season
The leaves are all falling
And they’re falling like they’re falling in love with the ground
And the trees are naked and lonely
I keep trying to tell them
New leaves will come around in the spring
But you can’t tell trees those things
They’re like me they just stand there
And don’t listen

I wish you were here
I’ve been missing you like crazy
I’ve been hazy eyed
Staring at the bottom of my glass again
Thinking of that time when it was so full
It was like we were tapping the moon for moonshine
Or sticking straws into the center of the sun
And sipping like icarus would forever kiss
The bullets from our guns
I never meant to fire you know
I know you never meant to fire lover

I know we never meant to hurt each other
Now the sky clicks from black to blue
And dusk looks like a bruise
I’ve been wrapping one night stands
Around my body like wedding bands
But none of them fit in the morning
They just slip off my fingers and slip out the door
And all that lingers is the scent of you
I once swore if I threw that scent into a wishing well
All the wishes in the world would come true

Do you remember
Do you remember the night I told you
I’ve never seen anything more perfect than
Than snow falling in the glow of a street light
Electricity bowing to nature
Mind bowing to heartbeat
This is gonna hurt bowing to I love you
I still love you like moons love the planets they circle around
Like children love recess bells
I still hear the sound of you
And think of playgrounds
Where outcasts who stutter
Beneath braces and bruises and acne
Finally learning that their rich handsome bullies
Are never gonna grow up to be happy
I think of happy when I think of you

So wherever you are I hope you’re happy
I really do
I hope the stars are kissing your cheeks tonight
I hope you finally found a way to quit smoking
I hope your lungs are open and breathing this life
I hope there’s a kite in your hand
That’s flying all the way up to orion
And you still got a thousand yards of string to let out
I hope you’re smiling
Like God is pulling at the corners of your mouth

‘Cause I might be naked and lonely
Shaking branches for bones
But I’m still time zones away
From who I was the day before we met
You were the first mile
Where my heart broke a sweat
And I wish you were here
I wish you’d never left
But mostly I wish you well
I wish you my very very best

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