The State Cannot Hold this Kind of Love

Love takes many forms: grief, resistance, rage, intimacy, pleasure. Far beyond what we’re conditioned to chase after—the illusion of false realities and perfect utopias.

There are many kinds of love the state cannot legitimize, let alone protect. The love preserved in the prayers of our ancestors. The love held in how we care for and protect the earth. The love carried in queer entanglements. The love found in the dreams of our future kin.

This is a meditation on that kind of love. The kind of love the state was never meant to hold and the kind we must refuse to let it steal from us.

Love, to me, has always been known by many names: ishq (عشق), muhabbat (محبت), pyaar (پیار), junoon (جنون), wafaa (وفاء). There is no singular expression of love. Love continues to exist in the most precarious of conditions: across borders and checkpoints, in bodies marked as deviant, under exile and occupation.

Much like mycelia, love is fugitive and relational; it spreads beneath the surface, weaving together networks of care and resistance. It knows how to survive in places where it was never meant to bloom, how to tend to wounds and transform them into dwellings. Thus, survival in itself is a prophecy, longing to be heard and witnessed.

I come from a tapestry of cultures that embody and practice love as an act of rebellion, that understand loving ourselves requires us to love the earth because all bodies of nature are interconnected. This is how love becomes contagious.

What if love is not a destination to arrive at, but an emergent state—something that unfolds and shapeshifts? What if love is a practice of be(com)ing kin?

To practice love in this way is a form of anarchy because it threatens the very foundations of empire built on stealing our dignity and right to love. It is a refusal of the dominant social order imposed by binaries and borders. To love in this way that the state cannot control or regulate is to resist; it is an act of insurgency.

The Mary Nardini Gang (A Gang of Criminal Queers) capture the essence of what it means to love as opposition to the state’s death-making infrastructure: “We queers and other insurgents have developed what good folks might call a criminal intimacy. We are exploring the material and affective solidarity fostered between outlaws and rebels. In our obstruction of law, we’ve illegally discovered the beauty in one another. In revealing our desire to our partners in crime, we’ve come to know each other more intimately than legality could ever allow.”

To love fugitively is not to run away but to move toward something freer than we can imagine. In a world that has taught us that not all bodies are worthy enough to be loved, we must reclaim our capacity to love, unapologetically and without fear.

When we choose to love fiercely, we are not just surviving empire. We are actively building what comes after its demise, what will grow in the aftermath of violence. Indeed, love is a form of worldmaking.

It is how we imagine and practice the otherwise. Every time we choose each other, we are in fact rehearsing liberation.

The empire thrives by conjuring amnesia and washing away its crimes. The places it plundered, the languages it erased, the cultures it destroyed, the types of love it criminalized. Dismembrance is a necessary part of its violent architecture. But love remembers what was never forgotten, only taken from us, outlawed, sidelined, and buried.

In this sense, you could say love is an archive. Holding onto the rituals of our ancestors. Preserving the stories of joy and pleasure. Knowing the rhythms of a place so deeply that it becomes part of how we breathe and move. Love itself is an act of resistance and, in the words of Palestinian visual artist Areej Kaoud, “Resistance is the deepest form of love.”

Our love is not waiting to be recognized.
It does not need to conform.
It does not need to be bound.
It is already here.
Alive.
Present.
Free.