“My whole adult life has been built on something else: on thin feeling, on myth, on instinct”
At the Atlantic, here’s “How I Met Your Mother,” a knockout from Ta-Nehisi Coates:
What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman’s direction. I can now say that I what I immediately felt that day was thin. I shall speak responsibly and say that love is built on years of struggle, on business, on the tight-spots from which you brawl your way out. And I shall speak honestly and tell you that my whole adult life has been built on something else — on thin feeling, on myth, on instinct, on the irrevocable desire to do the sort of filthy things that makes respectable people shriek, “Think of the children.”
The essay is startlingly honest about adulthood (“We have held ourselves together with good reasons. But we have always known that love is not made by respectable people but by the freaks who come out at night”), part self-exploration and part confession.
But mostly I am thinking of you. I want to tell you that I have fallen for Paris. I think you know. I think you know because I am stupid and I am cliché. A serious man should should fall for some village in Moldova, for brandies made from magic apples, or ham taken from a rare and endangered hogs. A serious man should claim to have discover Nashville, should live in Austin before it is Austin, then leave with tales of the edgy old days. I have been told that serious men are buying homes in Detroit. But I love chicken fingers. And I have never been to Foxwoods or Vegas. And I love New York against my better wishes. And I love Paris with that same familiar feeling — aching, everywhere and thin.
But mostly Coates writes this short, beautiful piece as a benediction.
You will see us ward you away with one hand, while the other still shakes at the memories. Here is the thing — you have the right to every end of your exploration and no motherfucker anywhere can tell you otherwise.