Kinds of love (after Gon Ben Ari):

The love of the sound of language.
The love of the shapes formed by one’s tongue in creating the sounds of language.
The love of English.
The love of one’s toes when they are freshly painted in a new color.
The love of discovering new words. This week: philtrum.
The love of one’s philtrum—which is to say, the cleft that runs between the nose and the upper lip.
The love of the small scar on one’s husband’s face, just to the left of his philtrum.
The love of one’s small dog for oneself, as expressed through nuanced positioning of the ears.
The love of reading one’s dog’s thoughts via the positioning of the ears.
The love of how weird it is that the dog has never actually spoken.
The love of articulating previously nebulous ideas.
The love of discovering terms for previously nebulous ideas. This week: patriarchal bargaining.
The love of one’s protagonist, despite her extensive reliance on patriarchal bargaining—which is to say, maneuvering within patriarchal systems to secure power or safety rather than fighting or disrupting the systems.
The love of one’s mother.
The love of French.
The love of Spanish.
The love of something Gon Ben Ari once said about how in English, the sentences in the Bible only mean one thing, while the same sentences in Hebrew mean many things.
The love of quotes half remembered, due to one’s terribly imperfect powers of recall.
The love of influence.
The love of jotting things down in compensation for terribly imperfect powers of recall.
The love of the inside of one’s own head, despite challenges such as: inner chaos.
The love of the patterns of black on white formed by words on a page.
The love of a room in which the only sound is the clicking of keys on a laptop.
The love of silence.
The love of knowing that one has rendered some things, sometimes, somewhat coherent.