Shawnta Smith and Jasmine Cruz, “We’re From Brooklyn, NY & The Bronx, NY”
Ex-lovers talk about living together and the meaning of their house and relationship. (Closed captioning available here)
omg, i am in LOVE with this video. awesome queer stories about building home, and community. <3
This is so powerful and beautiful.
I love this.
I lived with an ex for a few months after we broke up and it was awful most of the time, but there were a few moments where we could just talk and be best friends and it was lovely. Our sex life, from my end anyway, had been over for months, maybe even a year, by the time we split, and I wished we could have kept the good parts and let go of the bad ones but it’s so hard.
Since he moved out I’ve been cobbling together love from lots of sources, fitting people into my life in ways that might not fit the normal boundaries of friends and lovers. I am constantly pushing and reshaping the bounds of what those things mean.
I tried to do it with someone recently and I don’t think he knows how. I don’t think he’s capable (yet? maybe ever?) of pushing those lines to see what else he can make. I don’t think he knows how to accept people for what they can give and to give them what you can even when you don’t think it’s enough. To not assign that one person responsibility for everything in your life, to know who to go to with this hurt and who to go to with that one, whose hugs make you feel better and who has the right words, who will get into a fight for you and who will get into one with you.
It doesn’t mean I’m never lonely, but it does mean that when one piece of my support system is gone it doesn’t immediately crumble and leave me wondering where I stand. And it leaves me to miss such very specific things about that person when they’re missing, it leaves me remembering the way their hand felt in mine or the particular angle of their arms around me, a way of laughing at my jokes, the anger they feel along with me.
Straight people don’t know how to do this as much, I think, because we’re so busy looking at the rules society has set up for us, and blurry lines on friendship and love are proscribed by fears around infidelity and rules about who can be friends with whom.
I see so many of my friends choosing friendship or relationship, pitting them against each other somehow, I see the tensions arise and I remember how that used to feel with my ex and I shudder and am glad that I’m single.
But neither single nor alone really suits how I feel, and the advice I gave to someone recently applies to all of us, really—“You don’t have to do this alone. You have to do some things alone, sure, but not being in a relationship doesn’t mean suffering through everything by yourself, it means learning who to call and how to distribute your needs so they can still, at the end, be met.”
(via guerrillamamamedicine)
