Some Notes on the Nature of Love
By Raia Small
/ Nonfiction /
In my dream, I was cleaning cow’s blood from the cloth mother. It wept through the fabric, a heart continuing to pump through a broken circuit. Sharp, mineral, and rotten, it stained my fingers, recalled garbage bags outside of New York City restaurants, how they stewed in the summer heat. I was repulsed but fastidious; just doing my job. The cloth mother housed a computer with wiring I couldn’t control or understand. Her head fanned like a lampshade. Eventually the blood slowed, then stopped. She drove away in a car with an old man I didn’t know. I wasn’t in the car but I saw them, my consciousness loosed from my body like an omniscient narrator. “I Wanna Be with You Everywhere” by Fleetwood Mac played on the stereo, a song on the surface about falling in love, but underneath, a song about death. Being in love isn’t like wanting to be with someone everywhere—it’s a rigid attachment to being with your beloved here and now, in this body, in this moment in time. Only death opens up the highway to float on all dimensions, limitless as the directions of light.
In my high school, mid-afternoon sun slanted through the classroom windows, drawing trapezoids on the institutional carpet. The psychology teacher stood backlit by the projector, talking about the infamous experiments that formed the foundation of human attachment theory. Twenty years later, I’ve forgotten the details, but the black and white photographs of the crude cloth and wire mothers are buried deep in my brain. The infant monkeys cling to their surrogates with tiny arms and eyes wet with want. The psychologist who did the experiment called his article “The Nature of Love,” which seems sweeping and grandiose coming from someone who tortured baby monkeys to prove something about human bonds. Still, it has embedded itself in me, a splinter I have yet to shed.
Last year, my friend Dave was murdered in prison. I didn’t see the blood, but I know it must have been there, that his heart kept beating after his arteries were crushed. I learned the news of his death through a phone call from a mutual friend I’d never met in person. 24 years in prison, 11 of them as my friend, one fateful walk to the payphone on a Saturday evening. I felt his essence spill into the world, watching me from the eyes of peonies, from over the rims of coffee cups. If I can’t be with you here, in our bodies and our lives, then let me be with you everywhere—in the ocean and on the freeway, pushing you in my shopping cart, running through your sagebrush chapparal. In the part of my dinner that sticks to the pan, the part of my heart that won’t heal over, the blood a musical pulsing.
In my grief over Dave’s death, I spent all day in my pajamas. My agendas melted like ice cubes on Arizona concrete. I looked at pictures of my friend from when he was alive, as many as I could find. All my compulsions to cook, clean, or move evaporated. Eventually the sun would lower and I’d summon a desire for the ocean or a milkshake, maybe a phone call while walking circles around an unfamiliar neighborhood, and let that steer me into evening, until I was tired enough to sleep. Even though Michael and I broke up 9 months before, he came over when I called, ordered dumplings, and listened to me talk about my friend. A week passed with no chores done or bills paid, no emails or texts returned. Somehow, I was still alive despite letting everything go. Somehow, I was more alive than I was before, touching something tender that my busy life kept away from me. I cried daily and let cat hair accumulate into tufts on the floor. I listened to “Living Life” by Daniel Johnston and imagined I was living life alongside him, even though he died decades ago.
When I go back to work after a week of leave, I tell my supervisor that I’m quitting. I could ask for a paid sabbatical or a lay-off to collect unemployment, but I’m afraid if I ask for anything, I’ll end up staying. My friend’s murder has unlocked something in me that lives beyond mundane fears about money, work, and other material fictions. Life is unbounded and uncontrollable, so I give up trying to contain it. What I couldn’t explain was how the world blued and rippled, not in absence, but in fullness. That death was the full bloom of life, smearing everything with its color, its textures. The wind on my face at the edge of the water. The sweet custard of banana ice cream, desired from beyond the reaches of my biography. The peonies grown by an unknown neighbor that greet me on daily walks to the lake or the grocery store. The open book of a stranger’s face. I set myself afloat down this river, letting the current carry me, no longer trying to steer in any one direction.
Three years earlier, my best friend Stacey died in the hospital from a surgery gone wrong. It was May 2020, two months into the pandemic, one week before the Minneapolis police station burned to the ground. I hadn’t seen Stacey since before shelter-in-place went into effect, when we lived in a different world. She had cajoled me into joining her on a pre-surgery trip to a hippie hot springs resort, one that had burned down and been rebuilt. Stacey was like that, always getting me to spend money, drink cocktails, eat ice cream, and gossip, pulling me off the course of my vacationless oatmeal-and-bike-commuting life. I held her in the hot tub to keep her trach dry, but in our friendship, she was always the one holding me up.
When I heard of her death, I was sheltering in place with my mom and stepdad in a woodsy suburb north of San Francisco. I had been depressed for two months, dreaming about the rising pandemic death toll, reality quickly overtaking the numbers in my dreams. My friend in Queens biked by refrigerated trucks of bodies outside of the hospital. My other friend in New York called an ambulance when Covid triggered her asthma, and they told her not to go to the hospital, that there was no point.
Stacey’s death wasn’t the first in my life, but it was the first that hit me, reality ribboning from full curtains into shaky strips. For the first three days, I cried while watching videos of her give talks and trainings on YouTube, grateful for this unintentional archive. I spent all morning looking at photos of her on Facebook in a daze of grief. After four days, I went back to work. I was afraid of becoming unmoored from my life in this wide-open state, but leaving it was a mistake. I wasn’t ready to go back.
Losing two friends in three years, all of us still shy of middle age, has changed me in a way I can barely articulate. If my life were an egg, it’s been cracked open and can never be glued back. Like when the pandemic started, and one layer of reality was pulled out from under us, revealing another one where life was much less guaranteed. Invisible viral particles recast all of my favorite libraries, bus lines, and corner stores in a threatening light. Now people have convinced themselves that they can have the old world back, but all I see are fissures. I watch people around me pretend that the pandemic is over while it carries on. They cram themselves into bars and restaurants, erasing the memory of the hospital parking lot. I rage against them for their recklessness, for choosing denial over grief.
During the summer after Dave died, I was writing on my balcony, watching the robins and jays sing to each other and peck bugs off the redwood trees in my neighbor’s yard. They are the only trees of their stature on the block, and they house an ecosystem of bugs, birds, squirrels, and other creatures I don’t even know about. The birds sang and chattered to each other even though all the other trees had been cut down, even on a day when the air swirled with wildfire smoke, lining their delicate lungs with particles of plastic, glass, and wood.
On that particular morning, I was waiting to hear back about an MRI that showed a mass in the left side of my tongue, wondering if this was going to be a point at which my life cleaved into a before and after. I foresaw all possibility of joy dying with the diagnosis, the way it would map my future into a narrow avoidance of death. I watched the birds gossip with each other while building their nests, even while the air grew thick with chemicals. Some of them might have cancers growing in their bodies that they would never know about. For the first time, I saw the dogged instinct to keep living, to keep chattering and building, with something other than derision. And the people packed into restaurants full of viral air: there was denial and its harms, but there was also an animal instinct for pleasure, for life, that wasn’t in itself evil or good. I have that instinct too, even when I rail against it: to keep making a life for myself in the wreckage, to keep moving toward the things that bring momentary relief despite the pain they might inflict, despite the damage accumulating in my organs while I drown it out with the sensory exaltations of the moment.
It’s hard to describe this turn of mind, from hating the capacity to look away from suffering to accepting it, even loving something about it. How tenderly foolish, how birdlike, how irrepressible. Lowering myself from arbiter of righteousness to just one of the animals, hurt and hurting, sitting on my balcony with my notebook and hibiscus tea, even while the air fills with carbon, even while I could already have death inscribed in my innocent cells.
Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments are now considered inhumane. He said, The only thing I care about is whether the monkeys will turn out a property I can publish. I don't have any love for them. Even as he raised them from infancy, forcing them to labor to make his hypotheses relevant to the human world, he saw them only as objects to manipulate, workers to produce property for him to sell. His callousness convinces me that he titled his article “The Nature of Love” in an effort to claim knowledge of something he didn’t understand, like a colonizer renaming a continent. Despite my anger, I don’t think you can know the nature of love without loving almost everyone and everything.
This spring, I did a spell where I took the pieces of my heart back from Michael, imagined them flying across the lake like Canada geese and pulling them into my chest as if by magnetic force, but the pieces felt blurry while Michael felt clear. I could already hear the loud clacking of his computer keyboard and the gentle notes of his piano, the sound of his socked feet bounding across the floorboards, see his wavy black hair framing the bald spot on the back of his head. The spell was supposed to deliver me from wanting and instead it brought me back in, reincarnating my heartbreak, giving it another lifespan to pulse along inside to.
The bottomless feeling in my chest, like I contain a universe of stars but no organs, is now attached to Michael’s sounds and shape, but it predates him and all of my attempts at love. He got close enough to rearrange my emotional furniture, but the longing isn’t for him, but for something ancient and unknown.
Maybe the dream means that I’m stubbornly trying to be ready to love again, no matter how much gruesome effort it requires. Maybe I’m cleaning the cloth mother for someone else, to send them off together in a car’s bounded interior and familiar velocity, with music reminding us that death exists in all of our love stories, a shadowy minor character who upends the entire plot. Maybe it means that I’m still seeking something, no matter how false, how robotic and constructed, to stand in for the love of my own mother, of Michael, of a god I haven’t known, of the friends who have left me only photographs to remember them by.
This morning, I write what I can remember of my dream while I watch my friend Rox move out of their Baltimore apartment over a video call, wooden slats of a dissembled bed frame up against the wall. In San Francisco, my friend Sam’s roommate left a hole where the sofa was, empty squares where paintings used to hang. I recall Michael telling me a secret while we waited for our vermicelli outside of the U-Haul, in a parking lot of boards hanging over the edge of the bay. That first night in my apartment, after scratching the surface of my dining table on a railing, after carrying my mom’s paintings up eight narrow flights of stairs, after failing to return the truck on time, I laid on my mattress on the floor and cried. Life is so effortful and so relentless, I wailed, until Michael was crying, too. How do we do this again and again and again—move apartments, bury our friends? There are times I feel so exhausted from it that I know I could survive any loss, no matter how devastating. Not out of strength, but because this ceaseless adaptation is a cruel aspect of human nature: make a taco salad out of Fritos in prison, make video calls stand in for hugs, make the cloth mother absorb and radiate the love we didn’t get but can’t let go of, finding it in shards that are too small to hold, too sharp to put down.
