“Between us there is always transcendence, not as an abstraction or a construct, a fabrication of the same grounding its origin or measuring its development, but as the resistance of a concrete and ideational reality: I will never be you, either in body or in thought.” (104)

“Recognizing you means or implies respecting you as other, accepting that I draw myself to a halt before you as before something insurmountable, a mystery, a freedom that will never be mine, a subjectivity that will never be mine, a mine that will never be mine.” (104)

“Spiritual progress can be understood, then, as the development of communication between us, in the form of individual and collective dialogue. Speech between replaces instinctual attraction or the attraction of similitude.” (104)

“I recognize you supposes that I cannot see right through you. You will never be entirely visible to me, but, thanks to that, I respect you as different from me. What I do not see of you draws me towards you provided you hold your own, and provided your energy allows me to hold my own and raise mine with you. I go towards you as towards that which I shall not see but which attracts me, like a path of becoming, of progress. This progress does not mean estrangement from flesh, from my body, from my history. I go towards that which enables me to become while remaining myself.” (104)

“I recognize you signifies that you are, that you exist, that you become. With this recognition, I mark you, I mark myself with completeness, with the negative. Neither you nor I are the whole nor the same, the principle of totalization. And our difference cannot be reduced to one hierarchy, one genealogy, one history. It cannot be weighed in terms of more or less. That would be to annihilate it.” (105)

– Luce Irigaray

I love to you: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History (1996)

—

Storge. Affection.

To be inside of you.

Times like this you realize the significance of milestones simultaneously amplify and erase themselves. Amplifications because currentyou can pat pastyou on the back for perseverance and survival and earning retrospect. Erasures because currentyou already possesses courage and willpower and scripts for futureyou to come to pass.

And what is storgelove based in physical places? What greater human-to-human storgelove is there than to know two are intimately connected emotionally and in everyday thought and speech so that the physical body recedes into taking up symbolism for to-contain, as an interface.

That love is not love because you have this face and this physique and occupy this space and generate bodily warmth that you can share or give or gift-to, but rather, love is love because you mutually, reciprocally, to-each-otherly inhabit a space inside of each other, such that home is every where.