#3: On stone fruit, Kodaline and the rituals of those we love
A story of why I love who I love, inspired by the anatomy of my favourite fruit and to the tune of Kodaline's "Brother".
Disclaimer: The word ‘love’ is used in this piece more times than you can possibly keep count of. I will explore the curves and crevices of love in a subsequent piece, I promise.
As one does on an absurdly late Tuesday night, I was reading up on mangoes as literary devices in diasporic literature while binging on Kodaline’s “Politics of Living” album. If you know me, you know that if there was a fruit to make me a fruitarian, it would certainly be any member of the stone fruit family. If you know me well, you also know that I have a penchant for Reddit which is generally a cornucopia of absolutely mind-numbing sludge mixed with the kind of quirky, offtrack intellectual beats my sapiosexual self adores. Anyway, it was on this opportune Tuesday night that I found a Reddit thread from one beloved Reddit user who was asking about the tasting notes of stone fruit. Taken out of context and somewhere in this surprisingly incisive, mildly political thread was this comment: “I always interpret it as a fruity and sweet flavor which later turns out to be true to expectations.”
Now, most people would likely scoff and move onto the next rabbit hole of a Reddit thread. But not me, good sir/madame.
Since I’ve sufficiently rambled (it’s literally in the manifesto of this newsletter), I should also share the key detail that I was binging on Kodaline’s “Politics of Living” album while reading through this clearly important, life-changing Reddit thread.
Something about the fact that I’m a loyal stone fruit disciple and my purist love for Kodaline got me wondering - in some ways the tasting notes of stone fruit serves as a tripped up metaphor for how we fall in love except the initial taste isn’t always true to expectations (which isn’t entirely bad if your expectations were low). Seemingly, we are at first, drawn to the perceived, fruity and sweet details of the person. But in time, after peeling away the flesh, we find their core, embedded with its own unique ridges. Ultimately, the ritual of tracing tasting notes of your favourite fruit is exactly how we experience the people we care about and fall in love with. Pardon the deep analogy, dudes.
As someone I love very much told me once, Fitzgerald deeply loved his complex and colourful wife, Zelda, in spite of and because of who she was. As I have spent the last several months exploring the depths of love in my relationships, I’ve returned to this statement time and time again. When I’ve fallen or rather truly stood in love , I’ve done so with the entirety of the person. I love love and so when I like someone, I fall into a sacred ritual of admiring and delighting in their quirky habits. Thus, even when a person may have navigated away from my life for a period, the memories I hold most dear to me are their individual and our collective rituals.
In a way, the ritual of admiring their rituals is a thesis of my core realisation as an almost-30 year old. When I love someone, I love them in spite of and because of their rituals.
Of course, it is then no coincidence that Brother by Kodaline was the tune I picked to keep me company while I write this piece. It was one of the many songs that this person I so love made a ritual of in our listening routine. That, and a healthy mix of the Libertines and Glass Animals. Throw in some garage band rock, and we were happy campers. In Brother, there’s a line that goes “we'll go deeper than the ink, beneath the skin of our tattoos, though we don't share the same blood.” And while I have no tattoos yet, this is how I feel about the rituals of the ones I love.
In more ways than one, love for me is the ritual of loving someone’s rituals - embracing how they take their coffee every morning, practically memorising the lyrics of the song they would binge listen to because I loved to hate on it, remembering how many times I told them to change said song until I grew to love it just as much as they did, thinking about how their lips pressed together right before every time they said I love you, recalling when they first told me about their favourite (and hardest) childhood memories, laughing at random jokes about their high school friends so many times that I felt like I knew them already, counting all the times we annoyed each other and said so …but seconds later, fell just a little more in love with each other anyway.
Learning about their rituals is also about learning all the ways in which the person I love may hurt me unwillingly one day, how their past experiences and inhibitions may eventually arrive at our shared doorstep too. Their rituals and my reactions to their rituals may even offer foreshadowing to the words that I know I will one day regret uttering and absolutely do not mean at all. But these are the words that I may say anyway in the heat of emotion because I know how they’ll land. Knowing their rituals is also what will get me through the pain, and offer a healing respite in the form of drafted communications I may or may not ever share. The long notes on my phone that I want to send but that I know I really shouldn’t. Or the not-so-chill “hi, hope you’re well” small talk texts I debate with my best friends about sending before deciding against it (thank you LB and AF for patiently indulging me in this routine). Because I know very well that these texts will never do justice to nor communicate the deep love I have for this person whose rituals I know so well.
You see, whether or not the person I love remains in my daily life past a certain time, their rituals stick with me forever. And the very same quirks that I once labelled as uniquely theirs, those become mine too. So when they (or I) leave for an extended period of time, my muscle memory clings to the rituals.
Love is, in fact, a festive process of celebrating rituals.
Past the initial sweetness, the tasting notes I was trying to figure out about the person at the very beginning, these take time to develop. To clarify, I am not saying that in order to and if we truly love someone, we are obligated to magically adopt all of their habits as our own or even accept these habits if they run counter to our spirit.
What I am saying instead is that you only acquire a true appreciation for the person’s character and depth through immersing in their rituals. Unconditionally loving someone through the ups and downs that life inevitably flings at us means transcending the initial banter and charm. Sometimes, this also means showing up when they’re afraid of showing you themselves when they feel at their lowest. Rituals help us bring our real selves, not necessarily always our best selves, to a relationship.
Life will throw you some really trying weather. Sometimes, the drizzles will wash away the initial impressions you had. Sometimes, you will be flung into entire storms that will pretty much erode everything but they will leave you with the rainbow-tinted souvenir of that person’s rituals. With time, you will find that the very same rituals that person you love used to anchor to are the ones you either partially adopted or that now continue to serve as your link back to that moment in that place with that person before that storm.
That’s one of my favourite things about love, that we can always return back to it long past the structural duration of an end date and remember how a ritual made us feel in a singular moment…like lying awake at 4 AM and bearing our souls yet again over a Paramore tune. Rituals are what allow us to make I loved you, I love you.
After all, it was Fitzgerald who said about Hemingway, “He's a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.”