On love at 18 years old

dear shanghai, although my knee is gravely scraped i still love you very very much. i will still bike. shanghai i missed you, the trees and excruciatingly humid afternoon strolls. i felt so alone and new in the vast body of yours, the beautiful feminine body feeding on the youth and elixir of western capital, the steadiness and eternity of silverlined names, the promise of the material. this body that is all of our bodies. i do feel much prettier when i come back to shanghai i don’t know why. “you fall in love too easily,” he said. two weeks ago i wrote “i am falling in love too easily” word for word, although in a different way than he meant it. today he said that he couldn’t believe how similar we were, and i think he likes me. did i love whoever i dated? i wouldn’t call these love but rather bursts of feelings needing an anchor, like a spring bird needing a resting branch and you happened to be a pretty looking flower. do i love my friends? yes. do i love the spinal mountains by the shore of california? yes. you see, how vast must we be to love. how vast must you be. photo is death i read a long time ago and therefore I believed that for a long time. [20 years old Helen recently read that to take a picture is to take proof and sneak up on the moment like a fly on a wall, and to write about it is to give substance to it.] anyways, I think my love is to take photos of what is loved. love is pretty. it’s quite simple, your glistening eyes, your smile your laugh, the humming of time and earth as the funeral march, a festival mourning a death at the end of the odyssey. and that’s love, the instant with a gush of history behind the hand pressing the shutter. i remember leaving a post-it note when i first read the Odyssey saying why do people drink wine and hold contests for three days to mourn a hero. every photo i take of you—you walking, you in golden hour, you talking to me over the screen with the blue blue sky behind you, you singing, you in early morning—becomes an urn i want to mourn with wine and trumpet songs, emphasis not on the urn but on the wine and trumpet songs. those are eternal. those are love.