Why Life is worth Living

On undying aliveness, love and my friend, Kate

For my beloved friend Kate, my Rose. This essay is a celebration of our love and friendship, and your love for Taylor and everything that makes you “an us”. To be alive is to be in love.

The other day while sitting on the train, which takes me from my tiny town tucked away, where the forest meets the sea and into the city of Copenhagen, I received an email from one of my oldest friends, Kate, from New York.

“With Love and Delight and Good News!!” The subject read and behind my sunglasses, tears started rising.

Kate, a Redheaded Canadian Native, tall and beautiful like dawn, and I gently collided in mutual solace and understanding after one too many drunk nights in my apartment on the Lower East Side in 2011. My two roommates and I had unintentionally turned out tiny shack of a home into a speak-easy club for skaters, models, rock musicians in spe, Tumblr kids and your general escapists, such as our downstairs neighbour, Eddie, who had a wife and a child living in the Financial District, while he partied with foreign teenagers. Every night we sat on our brown leather IKEA couch, the centrepiece of the apartment, around our vintage glass coffee table and played hard rock on a questionable speaker. We lined up every bottle of Svedka and cheap deli wine we devoured on top of our kitchen cabinets. Totems of pride and regret. Friends and foes would crash on the floor, while I’ll tiptoed around them to get to the bathroom.

Our 4th floor walkup on Delancey and Allen was named DLNZ, and at one point, someone from the group overheard someone asking about: “This new club called DLNZ” It all started with an ugly Christmas sweater party before the group split for the holidays. When we came back in January, everyone were depressed and so we decided to host another party that came to stay for 3 months straight. It was by the end of this months long marathon that Kate and I connected. We craved substantial and sober conversations. Something, where the tenderness of the night, wouldn’t be forgotten in the light of the morning. A Summer ago I’d immersed myself in Blake and Rimbaud and become obsessed with connecting with “What is real” That, which seem to be the unspeakable that all poets wrote about. The marriage between Heaven and Hell. Kate understood me, instantly. She understood me when I’d spent a whole night, obsessively drawing circles, waiting for a portal to open and reveal the cosmic balance of all things. She understood me when words fell short and instead, my body went into ecstasy as I tried describing the unbearable lightness of being, that revealed itself to me after a long winter. She was also the first friend who didn’t seem to be taken aback by the velocity of joy my body seemed to house, resulting in the joy multiplying in the reflection of a friend.