what does it mean, to commune?

On my shelf, there’s one particular book that I haven’t opened for years now. It’s called Big Friendship, by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, and its contents is as punchy as its vivid yellow cover: relationships of all kinds, not just romantic, deserve investment, tender love and care, work. A friend can be as consequential to your sense of being, your survival, as a life partner — even though heteronormativity implores us to privilege the later.

I’ve been thinking lately about how it means to have friends, be in relationship, nurture and be nurtured by a community. We speak of community all the time. In bureaucratese,

we throw around community to refer to bounded groups of people who share a cultural identity (often but not always ethnic: the Vietnamese community! the Italian community!), or perhaps a certain postcode (this neighbourhood, that borough). Elsewhere, the community is defined through a prism of a specific institution or organisation, or even just shared purposes or causes or aims (I’m thinking religious, here).

Sometimes we also speak of Community with a capital C, in the same way we speak of Government with a capital G: in the abstract, and as a stand-in not for any particular group of people, but as the very principle that there is a people out there, who may not be organised into any specific form or structure, to which we are answerable.

Most of us belong to these forms of community, I suspect. Personally, I recognise myself in many, and feel politically invested in them, and have actively sought to foster my ties to them. And yet, at the most base level, at my core,

why do I still feel so unmoored?