As the pilot announced the final descent into O’Hare I looked out the window at what could be described as bleak late-March Midwestern landscape. Flat as far as the eye could see. Brown, lifeless, suburban sprawl extending out to the horizon. Artificial looking subdivisions, cul-de-sacs carved into what used to be woodlands, long since developed into farm land or covered over with parking lots and stroads. Shopping centres with names alluding to the nature that has been covered over with concrete and asphalt, ‘forest oaks’ or ‘streamwood hills’. 

When I saw the squat, brick multi-unit brick apartment buildings near the airport and I felt revulsion in my body. I wasn’t expecting to have such a visceral reaction.  Or maybe embodied is a more accurate description.

In ‘Loving a place that is dying’ Laura Candiotto talks about how deeply love and grief are intertwined. Terms like eco-grief and solastalgia (“a form of emotional or existential distress caused by negatively perceived environmental change”) have become common in environmental humanities literature, but these fail to capture the feeling of returning to a place that was the site of so many conflicting emotions.  Candiotto argues that grief is the post-script to love, rather than the opposite.  We can only grieve what we have loved.  

She also describes love as being embodied, enacted through gestures, habits, attention, care, and presence. Love does not just exist in the mind.  This resonates with me as I feel my body react to this landscape, to these buildings, as well as to the lives and bodies that inhabit it.  

 “Loving is not merely a subjective feeling nor an objective state. Instead, it is participatory sense‑making.”  Conceptualising love as participatory with relation to place, casts both my fellow humans and non-human actors as participants enacting this love, and its post-script of grief.  I feel both love and grief in my body.  

I am tired of containing multitudes.  Today I would like to contain fuck all. 

While Candiotto’s definition of love is primarily concerned with the love of place or environment, conceptualising it this way is useful in other contexts.  My impulse was to write that I am sorry I said I love you after you came in my mouth.  Using Candiotto’s definition however I can attribute this to a participatory sense-making experience, in which you are an active participant.  

I started reading the Argonauts the following day, instantly blown away by the first paragraph:

Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. 

My face was not smashed against a dank floor but the oxytocin spreading through my body and the bubbles we drank in the bath made me feel like that is what I needed to tell you in that moment.  Some need to make the implicit explicit.  Like Candiotto argues – the feelings of love not just living in my head but having their own life as well.  Perhaps that is the incantation Nelson is describing.  I immediately regretted it and tried to pretend I hadn’t said it.  It felt more like verbal diarrhoea than incantation, but I never claimed to be as poetic as Maggie Nelson.  

The next day I send you a link to a scientific paper on the role of neurochemicals in intimate connection.  I send you a screenshot of the following text:

The post-orgasmic consolidation window (15-45 minutes) requires sustained physical proximity to trigger a secondary oxytocin release that converts pleasure into lasting attachment

What I am really trying to say is that I am sorry for telling you I love you, then overexplaining until you feel like you have to say it back.  What I am really trying to say is that we are helpless victims of millenia of evolutionary biology and social conditioning.

‘We’re in trouble’ you text back.