Keep something soft near you

When two people kiss, they make one long, warm tube with buttholes on both ends. Unlike the hands or the arms, the tongue is an organ that goes its entire life without expecting to ever meet a peer. So, when it does meet a fellow equal, in that dark, moist cave that no one except the dentist enters, it moves with the hesitance and wonder of Marco Polo meeting the first Mongol at the gates of Shangdu.

Kissing is like leaning too far out a window to smell the air after it rains, like tipping your chair back just a little too much, that held breath, that little panic and pleasure all at once. Kissing is about time: how it stretches and wiggles, how it reverses object permanence so that the entire world disappears behind eyelids, how it makes the heart feel not louder but closer and bigger, as if it had climbed into the throat to listen. Kissing is about proximity, about letting someone near enough to see your pores and your dilated pupils, to inhale your ghost and taste the lie you told when you were eighteen, to press their day against yours, to blur the line between what you meant and what you did, and every kiss was both a question about love and a mercy in the face of it, a reimagination of who you were willing to become.

And in the end, it’s about finding back a softness and letting it touch you:

Softness like the inside of a rose before it opens, the breath of a Labrador resting her head on your knees, like the edge of a Sunday, the worn-out collar of an old cotton shirt, the sound of books being flipped in a quiet library, the under-eye skin of someone who just cried, the belly of a spoon warmed by tea, the corners of a page folded so many times they’ve thinned into translucence, the few seconds of silence after a song ends and before the next one begins, fog hovering above the city skyline, breath in cold air when it comes out in little clouds, overripe peaches bruised just from the sun shining on it too hard, and morning light hitting dust midair. Softness like the posture of a grandmother picking up crumbs from under your chair after lunch, the tone of a mother’s refusal to raise her voice, of a sister smoothing the hem of a dress she’d never wear outside the house, of a child rocking back and forth because that’s what we do when no one holds us…

Softness like the bales the cows nudge at before the fields are stripped for metals and greed, softness like incense smoke pressed between palms in prayer, or the limpness of a dead rabbit; softness like forgetting, like remembering wrong then realizing that those details don’t matter anymore, because sometimes, softness feels best when you don’t expect it and don’t expect to need it.

Softness like the way I knelt on the kitchen floor this morning, picking up individual tulip petals one by one, papery and silky and barely still themselves, yellow and turning brown at the edges, and some had curled inward like they were ashamed, and some had spread flat like they’d decided to die without hesitation—and it felt so tender to touch them, like it was a reminder that I wasn’t handling anything else in my life gently enough. Softness like love.

Softness like my cat’s trills when he sees me in the morning, the way he sticks his tail high in the air and rubs his entire body by my ankles and purrs like a washboard, the way he pushes his face into my palm when I’m about to pet him. I even wrote a poem about him because I love him so much:

His name is Fitz, Fitzgerald on the dotted line

My first job ever (I was 16) was at a veterinary clinic. I was the admin of admins—clean litter boxes, feed cats, restock cotton pads, walk dogs, hold an animal still while they were shaved in weird patches for surgery. My job was mostly to just be around. I loved it because I love animals; holding as many kittens as my arms could possibly hold, tossing treats at drooling mouths.

I watched a lot. Watched the vet tie a quick suture after testicles were popped out of the scrotum like grapes. Watched a retriever’s mouth slacken under the sedative. Watched ultrasounds reveal tumors or litters of bean-shaped puppies. Watched the receptionist gently comfort a crying client who was about to say goodbye to their best friend. I watched a family sob in the parking lot as their German Shepherd was getting put down in the back of the car because the dog couldn’t make it up the steps.

I learned how to hold animals still. How to avoid fighting an angry, hissing cat because that’s a battle you never win. How to wrap a towel around a shaking body so it wouldn’t hurt itself. Animals don’t pretend, they just are. Shaking, purring, snarling, throwing up, peeing on the floor. Whatever needed doing. In general, handling pets teaches you this rule: don’t pass your fear to the animal. Be still. Be calm. Be soft.

That stayed with me more than the surgeries or the smell or the paperwork. Simply, you can’t help something if you flinch every time it moves.

And so, softness, the thing people go their entire lives mistaking for weakness, for indulgence, for something passive and pink like the inside of a seashell, softness that boys were taught to unlearn and girls, to perform but never feel, softness which was spat out of the mouth of war and law and sport as if it were a disease, it was never weakness, it was the opposite: it was the muscle that didn’t need to flex to be known, the strength in tending through the dull ache of sad afternoons, of sitting beside pain without solving it, of returning again and again to the same small rituals that keep the world from splitting open—the soft things, the forgotten things, the invisible shape of grace. And it takes more power to be kind in an unkind room than it does to win it, more courage to touch gently than to grab, to listen than to speak, to hold space than to fill it. And softness is not surrender but discipline, not fragility but form.

And in the end, it’s softness that remains. After the tulips die, it’s softness that rebuilds, that remembers, that chooses to witness even when it would be easier to look away, that says I am, I am, I am, not with the will to power, but the will to rise, again, and again, and again, and again…

Amazing. Handsome. Darling.

Thanks for reading,

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