From A to R (A Brief Theory of Love)

Once I was browsing the internet I came across this image. It is from a New York Times dispatch from 2014. It is a handwritten note scrawled on a torn cigarette case by a refugee found in Pozzalo, a small coastal town in Sicily where hundreds of refugees land frequently. The letter, The New York Times reports, is written in Egyptian dialect. Translated into English:

I wanted to be with you.

Don’t you dare forget me.

I love you very much.

My wish is for you not to forget me.

Be well my love.

A loves R. I love you.

At a glance one would think of the image as some indecipherable inscription on a papyrus, like a language long dead. Rather it is a heartbreaking document of our time. A letter whose urgency and finality of tone underlines the ultimate sorrow of this century: migration.

This image, this letter has entered my dreams countless times; even during my waking days it comes to me like a bird sweeping by the window enwrapping my consciousness in its flight. How many times have I imagined A writing the letter on an overcrowded fishing boat adrift in the Mediterranean only to lose it during the confusion which ensues when the boat reaches the shore. How many times have we heard of this story—of the letter unsent?

There is something quite deceiving about A’s handwriting. The longhand is possessed with a rare grace as though the note had been written in a moment of safety and peace not in the hour of darkness. There is not a trace of rush, pressure, or even defeat, only an aching care as though this tiny letter were a map when the immensity of the blackness swamped all the compass and meanings.

I wanted to be with you.

The desire of the heart is for nearness. Longing denotes the distance between two bodies. The want is to surge toward the other. Longing does not make us whole; it makes us unfinished. Those who must contend with separation must always reach for, touch at, move towards, course through, embody, evoke, connive, declare, write… In longing sleeps the bone of reunion.

Don’t you dare forget me.

It is not a command but an entreaty. A hope against hope. Forgetting is the ultimate defeat of the exile. Remembrance is a life vest. Every migrant knows this. To leave one’s homeland is a definite, unalterable farewell. In separation everything is taken away except what can be remembered which is a relic of what has stayed.

I love you very much.

The substance and worth of these words can only be measured by one’s involvement. Unless one is involved, unless one contends with the inevitable, one fails to sense the urgency of these words.

It is one thing to say I love you and stay and another thing to confess and be swept away. Both have unaccountable consequences. I’m not sure whose hell is more profound: the hell of the one who stayed or the hell of the one who left.

No other words in the human language scare the powerful than these words—I love you very much—in the mouth of the powerless. For in the very utterance of these words something happens, everything is risked. All reassurances are left behind, all acts become possible, all energies are contrived in the here and now. The promise of togetherness is in the instant. There is no force that can topple power than the dangerous, unifying capacity to love of the powerless.

My wish is for you not to forget me.

More than anything else the wish is not to survive but to be remembered. Survival is no survival if abandoned by memory. One can only truly live in the presence of remembering.

Be well my love.

Or: I’d rather you live without me than I live without you.

A loves R.

Note the third person singular present tense loves. A word, an act, plucked out of the human ribs. It is recurring. It is happening. Driving closer to the coast, reaching the promise of remembrance. A declaration that bears witness to the cruelty of this life. Loves—that formidable, aching resurgence of will.

I love you

From whence did the words I love you first arise?

From the fear, the ache, the pain, from the inconsolable inevitability of separation. From the refusal to accept the world as it is.

Repeat I love you until the beloved is brought up the shore safe and sound.

I have not read a letter so heartbreakingly brief, so tragically helpless and tender it makes us all fugitives in this world of injustice.

Wherever A and R are, whether alive or otherwise, may God watch over their souls.