I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.
In these final few couplets of his poem Tonight I can write the saddest lines, Pablo Neruda considers his affective relationship to a woman he is no longer with. “It” may be “certain” that he no longer loves her, but he is not so certain at all, as he evidences quite directly in the final stanza: “I no longer love her…but maybe I love her.” Neruda presents here the dichotomy at the root of the lover’s angst: we demand or expect that it be discrete and finite, that one day it will end or be relegated to a memory situated neatly and squarely in the past, while in reality it permeates outward, even the memory of it, into a future where it no longer exists in a relational, material sense but still animates fantasy and desire (such that they threaten to become longing, the shittiest? and most beautiful? of emotions).
Jeanette Winterson’s book Written on the Body is a tale of longing and memory, recounted by a nameless, genderless narrator. It opens with the following line: “Why is the measure of love loss?” We might wonder back to her, is it? Or, is it always? It’s worth thinking about how love as a form of attachment engenders certain promises related to fulfillment (see Berlant’s writing on “getting a life” as “getting a partner,” can’t remember where that is). If loss is our way of estimating love, love and its memory become an anarchive, theorized by Jacques Derrida to refer to archives as indexes of loss and absence.
My personal favorite form of anarchive is Craigslist Missed Connections, where optimists and pessimists coalesce anonymously around an unlikely, unrealized dream that is nonetheless possible — that I may have connected with this person I saw on the street or in the subway, if I had only been brave enough or timely enough or sure enough of myself, that this connection would confirm all of my suspicions about love’s clichés and promises, that this might change everything. That in any case, it’s worth a shot.
Critically, Missed Connections is about a real encounter that’s already taken place, archiving something that's both lost or (literally) missed and a fantastical future that's unrealized, unlikely, but nonetheless possible. The posts will disappear, just as the moment they are archiving has. The posts are undergirded by a sustaining optimism (cruel, sometimes, vis-a-vis Lauren Berlant) and sanguine, confessional desire, given the unlikely scenario in which a post actually materializes into the object of its intention — a re-connection, at minimum, and a successful one that lives up to the fantasy constructed about it and what it might be. Posting on Missed Connections is a shout into the void — and yet, people shout nonetheless, all the time. For example, from early October:
Saw the world in your eyes: Hiking north beacon mountain (Beacon)
Obviously the chances of this reaching you are almost zero, but if the universe says it's meant to be then you might be a weirdo and check here for no reason.
Anyways, you were hiking with your mom on the last warm day of this fall, and we passed each other. I stepped to the side so the both of you could pass. Your mom was working hard. We made eye contact and exchanged the normal, quick pleasantries.
But as I walked away, something lurched in my heart and I just couldn't get you out of my head. For some reason, I felt you were the most beautiful girl in the world. Your eyes contained multitudes. I dreamt I loved and lost in the span of 10 seconds, and decades from now, I'll say I fell in love on a warm October day and never saw her again.
Something more, something not of this world passed between us from just one glance. It was the whole universe and all the feelings within. I know it and it pains me to think that this will be the only time in my life I feel something more than human. I will cherish it and I hope you did not feel the same so you won't have to bear the weight of this singular magical moment.
The author of the post admits how unlikely it is that the intention of the post will come to fruition, going as far as hoping that they have actually fictionalized the affective charge of the event so that the post’s subject might be spared the life of longing its author is now consigned to. Where does this feeling come from, this notion that contained within a glance is something extraordinary, and that that glance is singular and irreplecable, so strong that it motivates us to recount it in great detail anonymously on the internet? This attachment to a dream of love that is destined or at least grounded in some other, supernatural plane? (“if the universe says it’s meant to be” — but what does this mean, for something to be meant to be?)
For me, Missed Connections is an opportunity to explore what desire and fantasy look and feel like today, in the particular context of an Internet-driven world with a seemingly infinite void of content and data. It is not about the act of seeking, the way other Internet romance platforms are (Hinge, Tinder, Feeld, etc etc etc). Rather, it foregrounds nostalgia, attachment to a dream that’s been glimpsed IRL. For another example, this post is from yesterday, November 10th, on Hudson Valley CL, titled Deja you? (kingston):
You were behind me in the post office.
You look familiar.
I know I’ve seen your eyes before.
And that sadness behind them is something I know all too well.
You were wearing a long brown coat.
It looked warm and stylish.
We glanced at each other three times while in line.
You smiled at me as you walked passed me to leave.
I should’ve said hi.
I hope something or someone makes you smile tonight.
The narrator of the post posits to know the sadness in the eyes of the post’s subject, based on their three shared glances. They profess their regret at not saying hi, but rather than writing a more conventional quip like, “If you see this, reply and tell me what color hat I was wearing,” they simply and sweetly hope that the subject smiles tonight. Though not directly articulated, the post itself implies some level of hope that its subject might see it and the connection they shared in the Kingston Post Office will be given another chance.
Love as an anarchive presents an interesting occasion for thinking more about how memory serves as a form of invention. Particularly after loss, it is memory alone that composes the entire relation to what was lost. The memory can never be seen or understood with clarity or certainty because it’s always reliant on our (in)ability to have perceived the moment in question “objectively” in the first place, which means absolutely nothing most of the time but especially in love. And every time the memory is called to mind, it risks being changed. The further a memory gets, the more times I recall it from a distance, the more it starts to feel like cinema, the less it feels possible. How am I sitting here now, but then I was sitting there and everything was different?
Near the end of Winterson’s book, the narrator tries and fails to find her estranged lover, Louise. The narrator says to a friend: “I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t even get near finding her. It’s as if Louise never existed, like a character in a book. Did I invent her?” The friend responds: “No, but you tried to. She wasn’t yours for the making.”
When Neruda writes, “Love is so short, and forgetting is so long,” he does so without even acknowledging how forgetting is actually remembering and also a creating, how when we least expect it we hear that song or smell that perfume and incoherent memories come flooding back like spiny, smooth driftwood. I’ve found that I have to really work to recall specific memories, and even then, it’s more like I have this idea of them and how they went, but still have to fabricate the details as honestly as possible. I like to think I remember the kitchen counters and the splintery porch, how he said my name when we were arguing or how my mother woke me up in the morning, but they’re more like bastard conglomerates of many memories, things that happened so many times their memorial has become a kind of habit, one laugh superimposed over a thousand others. I have to imagine the nooks of the wood before it drifted and I have no way of knowing, really, how closely my imaginings reflect what it really was. I only have this worn out, wet piece of wood and the awareness that at least I know for certain it was wood, that it still is.
Of course, if we think too much about how closely memory reflects reality, we need to also wonder how closely our understanding of the present reflects reality, and confront, seriously, how subjective all of it really is.
Some of the Missed Connections posts really make my heart ache, so sincere in this way I find to be rare and almost crude. Is it the anonymity that makes possible their sincerity? The ephemerality? The near impossibility of the demand? They profess the kind of intimacy that makes you almost want to look away, knowing it isn’t intended for you, while also being intended precisely for you. Because in addition to those posts that recount a passing glance or a dream of desire, there are those that document loves past, like a public diary wherein we may express to strangers on the internet what we may not be able to express to our friends or family. Take this one from Los Alamos:
The way things were. (Los Alamos)
Do you remember what we did in the back of your car? The fun we had sneaking around. They say i was a homewrecker but you were never happy with her not like you were with me. I still think about you now that I’ve moved. Your hands rubbing in all the right places… If i came back would you want to continue… the gifts and money were a bonus but the way you’d handle me was the real prize. I’ll think about your touches forever.
ox
s
Mostly, this post is about a transactional relationship, with sex, gifts, and money as currency. But the post ends with the author’s ongoing attachment to the lover’s touches, the memory of which have superseded the conclusion of the relationship. The author even violates the pact of anonymity normally promised and intended by CL Missed Connections by signing with their initial. Who is this post for? The lover? The haters? The author? Does it matter? Couldn’t the author have called their former lover and said this in privacy, over the phone? For whatever reason, this transient Internet platform was more apt.
In some ways, Missed Connections is a little like trying to communicate with someone by hoping your voice finds the wind so that you may touch her hearing. It’s convoluted and messy, it’s speaking to someone who may never hear it and speaking anyway because their hearing it is not even the point. Like this post from New Mexico says,
many things are possible (Santa Fe)
"Many things are possible where first there is trust," you said. I agree. But I lost your number. Your initials: MM.