This All

From poster of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, Paramount Pictures, 1970

by Masha Tupitsyn

In an email thread today with my mother:

Mom: You still. Have time. Things can happen in one day.

Me: I love that you say that and believe that. I believe this too, still, but does anyone else? In the movies, people only need one day to change their lives. But in real life, people won’t let themselves be changed by anything or anyone. Let alone in one day.

Mom: Your life can change in one day. But then it is a miracle.

Me: Remember when dad told me over Skype, “all you need is a miracle”? Like this huge thing–a miracle–was this tiny thing. This “all”, which is what a miracle is–all as in everything–became this reasonable increment that everyone deserves and can have at any moment.

In a movie (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, 1970) I recently watched and added to Love Sounds, there is this line:

And love makes a choice.

Thinking about the post I wrote earlier today:

Has anyone ever really wanted to be—to stay—together? Or did people stay together because there were once structures, no longer in place, that produced togetherness?

Obviously makes me think about precarity and what’s left of love, desire, life, people, without external (edifying) structures of duration. Do we have—can we build/rebuild—the internal structures of duration and commmitment and cause that we never had in order to hold up the things and people that we need to hold up and hold onto?

This will save us and make us want to live. This will teach us how to live well. With wellness. Because what is life but the desire to keep going?

Crossposted with Love Dog.