Where do I begin?... More importantly, where do you end?
Destin Conrad writes a romantic and karmic-restoring record angelically delivered by both him and Kehlani
I adore Destin Conrad and Kehlani. I love their friendship, their Queerness, their creativity, their gorgeous voices, etc. What’s not to love? When I first heard this record, I knew who wrote the song based on the lyrics alone. Destin Conrad has a very particular poetic-ness that is often missing from some of Kehlani’s other records. Not that she also doesn’t have this capacity, but Destin’s lyrics are usually far more subtle. You have to unearth the presuppositions underscoring his words:
“It comes in the form of a lightning and storm, and the white of the waves as they crush on the shore, and one thing's for sure, that I loved you before, in every life and every form. And you're such a whirlwind, girl, you're such a portal.”
Often when we think about probabilities of love, we think too literally and too granularly: the overall divorce rate in America is 42%, 59% of Black adults die single, only 8% of gay men live in the same household with their partner1. And while the available statistics aren’t exactly reassuring, Destin and Kehlani ask an even more unnerving question addressing the existential likelihoods that resulted in our current form(s) altogether. What were the chances of you being, well, you?
Quantifying this is pretty challenging, but it isn’t impossible. To find love on Earth within the massive expanse of our universe, an uncountable amount of atomic and subatomic particles had to be positioned in one or a few particular orientations at the beginning of time such that every event led to the exact moment, coalescing to your birth: Every event from the Big Bang and onward led to the birth of the Milky Way; then, Earth needed the perfect alchemy of fundamental elements—CHNOPS—to construct the organic material found on this planet. Asteroids and comets found themselves on the perfect trajectories to crash onto Earth, bringing water with them2. All of this just so you could come into fruition. Your mere being or “form” is nothing short of a miracle. And the exact same impossibility holds true for every other human in existence. So if you ever find love on this planet, in this life, just know that you are one lucky clump of cells.
The odds were most definitely stacked against you. It was actually much more likely for you to exist as literally anything else—like “lightning” or “the white of waves”—or nothing at all than for you to exist as you are now, reading this. And in some senses, you already are and/or will be all of those other possible forms, whether it is spiritually from reincarnation, biologically through decomposition, or (meta)physically via a mass density ontology. To 1) be and 2) find love on Earth-1218 is a rarity not granted to every person (or particle) in the universe. Cherish your romances. Safeguard them. Feel them because in the next life, you may not be a form that is as auspicious as you currently are.
This could be an egregious miscalculation via back-of-the-napkin math, but either way the number would be lower than ideal. I took the number of same-sex households in the US. Then, I halved that to account for only men. Then, I divided by the overall number of gay men in the US.
This is only one theory about how water was introduced to our planet, but you get the point.