To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

I have been obsessed with the concept of love since I was 17, I remember for a long time the background picture of my profile was Raymond Carver’s poem Last Fragment:

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I was so depressed at the age of 17, the age when you are so close to call yourself an adult while you still know nothing about living. I dreamed about death, about killing myself in sleep, about never being born. The worst part of depression is not you can’t feel happiness, but you can’t feel love. That you feel burden from hugs, see weathering in blooming, hear disappointment in expectations. You remember what love feels like, but the memory is slowing fading, and you are scared of what will happen when you eventually forget. So, if I can say that safely, what I experienced was the abandonment of love.

After getting into university, as an art student I got so much time to study about love. What is it? What exactly, is love?  I’ve always been obsessed with things that don’t have a shape—things you can’t define, and therefore can’t own. You can only describe them, using limited words: how they make you feel, how they look through your bare human eyes, their colour, warmth, motion, and how you have been forever changed. Words are not reliable, neither are we. In fact, that’s the charm of it: every time we try to say something, the meaning shifts a little, slightly bent. We can’t be objective about anything, we can’t see ourselves through the eyes of God. So when people talk about love, what you hear is always, in some ways, people talking about themselves.

I have to connect love to water, both are flowing, both are the source of life. I used to live near the Thames. I liked to take evening walks along the riverbank, many times I stared at the sunset flickering on the surface, or at how the water gently held the moon. I forgot about myself in those long staring. No one was around, so for a little while, I wasn’t there.

When a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound? If no one is seeing me - witnessing my being - do I still exist? As a society, we talk a lot about identity, about drawing the lines between I and other. That’s a form of resistance, a self-defence. Any yes, that’s necessary. But resistance is a response, not being.

I was 21, I wanted to disappear. Not to die, I was over that, but to disappear. So no one could see me or touch me, or have expectations about what my life should be. If I am not being seen, maybe I don’t need to make decisions anymore. I can just be. Melting into the air around me, be a tiny little dust floating. You might catch my reflection under the sun, but you could never reach me, you’d even wonder if I had ever existed.

But then, I do want to be seen. I want to be seen so badly I want to be held, I want to be loved. I want fingertips running gently through my hair, then lacing into mine. I want someone’s gaze to rest on my closed eyelids, waiting for them to open again.

Love serves like a mirror, Foucault wrote at the end of The Utopian Body: “Love also, like the mirror and like death—it appeases the utopia of your body, it hushes it, it calms it, it encloses it as if in a box, it shuts and seals it…… we love so much to make love, it is because, in love, the body is here.”

We are being thrown into this world, one by one, we could never fully understand another person - what they think, how they feel. We are lonely, and we try every possible way to escape from this destined loneliness. We join religions, or communities, or go to parties. We drink, take drugs, or just listen to music, trying to lose ourselves in something bigger, so for a few moments we feel like we are not alone.

I used to go to a Catholic middle school, I am not religious, but one thing a teacher there said really stuck with me: “It’s not God tells you to love, but God is love. When you love someone, God is there between you.” It reminds me of a line from the film Before Sunrise, when Celine and Jesse are sitting together in an alley, she says:

 “I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

Love is hope. It does not eliminate our loneliness, but it makes it better. It does not connect us but it’s the attempt to connect, to understand, to go beyond the boundary of our physical body.

I was thinking to myself recently that I really want to love someone, we often hear people saying they want to be loved but rarely hear the opposite. There are so many tutorials online teaching people how to love less and being loved more, how to put minimal input to receive maximum benefit, how to get more and more as if love is a resource no different as money or land or designer bags. It’s such a capitalist way of thinking, making everything into a limited resource that needs to be competed for, accumulated, and owned.

I am learning how to love people this year, my mum has very poor health, but she wants everything at home to be spotless. Even when her head aches, she still insists on hand washing all the clothes before putting them in the machine, wiping every corner of the kitchen after cooking, so it looks like it’s never been used. For years, I’ve said to her: “Why do you need everything to be so clean? Just throw them into the machine. What’s the point of all these cleaning?” But during my time living with my parents this year, I stopped telling her not to clean. I did the cleanings instead, I hand washed the clothes and wiped down the counters, made their bed every day after they left to work. I still don’t see the point, but this is what she wants, and I love her. I did those things - so she would feel loved, so she can finally rest.

Love, I’ve come to believe, is not something you helplessly fall into, a stream you get swept away by. The most touching words are not I love you, but rather:

I choose to love you, and I would choose it again.

And again.

14 May 2025