“Where There’s Three People, There’s Love”

I tried to convince Kina today that love could exist wherever two people did. She offered, in response, that there wasn’t much point without three. This makes sense, because most of the love that Kina has experienced in the last year has been in the context of our immediate family. She knows the constituent parts of that love—my love for her, her love for her mother, her parents’ love of each other, and all the inversions of that love—but to her, love is the love of family. Her family is three people, and so love is three people.

It is not always true, of course, that love can be found wherever people are gathered together; I know that, because I have some experience with gatherings of people—and with love. Kina needn’t worry herself with the complexities of that, for now, but it’s probably true that I need to emphasize to her the importance of there being love wherever one person can be found. She’s doing a great job of loving herself at the moment, as we have recently discussed, but you don’t get to hold onto that for free. She will need to work at it, because three people in, say, middle school? It’s not all love, girl.

At the moment, though, she spends a lot of time in this little group of three that is her family, and we do love each other. I like to imagine her walking around Brooklyn, seeing small groups of people clustered together in line for coffee, and thinking to herself, “There is love.” A mindset like that is encouraging when you scale that up to the population of New York City, of this country, of the world. As long as we’re all traveling in trios, we’ll be fine—at least if you ask the kid.

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