Pitter patter pitter patter, my heart trips and dives and flips and flies for you. Can you hear it running down the streets of my chest? Blood is racing through my veins and my heart is banging like a drum thump thump thump crash. The cymbals crash and everything comes to a halt as I lose my breath when you laugh.
They say a million things about love. They say it's a feeling, it's an action, it's a noun, it's a verb. They say it's intangible and indescribable and only the intrepid can infer its identity. Can hope to grasp it in the palm of their hand. Love is not for cowards, they say it's a risk, it's a gamble. It's wearing your heart on your sleeve when it belongs tucked safely away in your chest far from harm. It's offering without expectation. It's devotion without dignity.
They write a million words about love. They write and write until they run out of analogies and aphorisms and ways to hide their abstractions. They cannot hide the truth, which is that most people know very little about true love.
I wildly devour their millions of musings about love but I confess that recently I am sick of it. I do not need their philosophical wanderings and contradictions to know that I love you and to show you love. I am ready to love you fully.
I know you feel alone sometimes when your thoughts whip into a whirlwind and your mind can't seem to stop whispering. But when that happens, remember that my love for you is such that you are always in my soul and that I carry you with me wherever I go. I consider you deeply. I love you unconditionally. I pine for you ardently every day. When you feel alone, remember that I think of you when the raindrops splatter on the pane of my window sill. I think of you when the sun rises and I feel it gently kiss my shoulders. I think of you when I see a spider dance in the air weaving its clever web or when I notice that nature is especially beautiful. I think of you also when I hear the thunder boom and catch lightning crackle across a stormy purple sky and smell the sharp scent of petrichor. If it is not apparent, I think of you so often that it consumes me and in my mind, there are many well-tred paths that lead to you. I suppose I am writing all this to say that when you feel alone, we are alone together.
I don't know how to love you quietly. I don't know how to share space with you and not start to gravitate. There is no way to hide my love, it is obvious for all to see. It spills out across my face because I am wonderstruck when you say my name. It falls from my lips with every word I send to chase your ears. My eyes cannot stop glancing at you after every joke to see if it made you smile. I cannot love you in secret, I can only love you loudly.
I used to try to love you quietly. But life is too short for such timidness - you do not deserve diluted love repressed by fear. You deserve a love full of courage and free of expectations. You deserve a perfect love, where perfect is not an unreachable state but an action of devotion. I cannot be perfect but I will perfect my love for you every day. Like a potter starts anew at the promise of each dawn, I will relentlessly refine my love for you.
The truth of it is that I am sick and sicker for the want of you. I am sorry my love - I wanted to put on a brave face in this letter and to send you some comfort from home. But I must confess that I am coming to the rapid realization that I can only live a half life without you. I miss you so deeply I feel a physical ache. There is a phantom pain haunting my chest. When we met, I believe something in me recognized something in you and I think I've never gotten it back. Is this what all the stories call love at first sight? I will try to be brave a little longer and to wait patiently with great hope of your return. I will comfort myself with the quiet joy that comes from knowing that I too am carrying a piece of your soul with me. I'll keep it safe always. love, come back to me.
I wanted to write you a more modern love letter today, but I think I've realized it's easier to confess my feelings truthfully when I sound completely different from how I usually talk. I guess after all my bragging and bravado, I'm still a bit of a coward. But I have to write to tell you that I can't stop thinking about you. I know that's the most expected and cliche confession ever but it's true. I don't think I've ever liked someone as long as I've liked you. I keep waiting for my heart to get over it but every time someone says something funny I start wishing you were there so you could hear it too and if I'm doing something interesting, I wish you were doing it with me. I wonder what you're doing every day. I want to know if you're happy or sad, frustrated or confident. I want to know how you're feeling about the world. Are you feeling angry at the injustice all around us? Did you wake up and feel at peace? I selfishly wonder if you think of me from time to time. It's okay if you don't. I don't even know if it's possible for you to think of me as much as I think of you.
How long would you wait for the one you love? I have been waiting for you my whole life it seems, and though the distance between us has created a yearning sharp in my soul, I know that I will wait for you as long as it takes.
I count the little moments with you as great joys.
It has been a year since I made your acquaintance. A year since I first stuttered at the stretch of your smile. And yet still I dream of you.
I lay down on tired carpet, stare up at plastic stars, and think of you.
I would be with you for a life and for a lifetime.
The space between our two twin hearts grows smaller and smaller.
As the universe expands infinitely, as it continues forever and ever, my love for you grows the same.
The stars we gaze at are dead and we are seeing but their fragile burning past lives, yet they remind me that in every past life of mine, my heart was drawn to yours.
My head spins dizzy when I look at you.
I exist in a liminal state when I'm around you. I feel like I'm constantly being transformed, metamorphosing but never reaching my final form. Just always existing in flux. I can see it, though. I can see that final version of myself with foggy clarity. The better person who I want to be, not just for you but for myself. I know I am not quite right for you yet, and I adore you for letting me grow until I am while loving me just the same.
I am a cloud, shaping myself in whichever way delights your eyes, blown by the gusts of your billowy laugh.
To me, you are the whole ocean. You pull me out to sea, you push me to the shores, you drag me down under your waves with a riptide. You have every face the ocean has. Some days you are in frothy fury, other days you are as still as a lake. The best days you are nothing less than dynamic, cresting joyously and flirting with the rays of the sun, sparkling in its gaze.
You are as distant as the moon and yet as inescapable. I love you knowing it is a hopeless love. I love you knowing I love on borrowed time and that I'm racing against a broken clock. I love you knowing I will never love another, that I will always be ensnared, always trapped in orbit.
Loving you is easy. It is no trial, no hardship, though if it were, it is one I would gladly bear, but you are so good to me. You are so good to everyone. I confess sometimes I work myself into paranoid anxieties because I want you to love me the most. I know it's a selfish want and one out of my control. After all, the heart wants what it wants. But my heart wants you and it has always wanted you and never another.
I was amazed when I met you, at how quickly my heart began skipping and how I fast I was then slipping and sinking into love. I do not love easily a love that lasts. By which I mean, I try to love everyone - to express love as an action - but the feeling of love, of endearment, of adoration, of enchantment, always faded away before you. The more I know someone the less I want to know most times. I fall in love with people's spirits. I fall in love with their souls. And your soul burns the brightest and purest of any I've met. Let my soul forever burn next to yours and we shall blaze through the darkness and shine all the brighter in the day.
We are stronger together. We make each other better. I am confident in our relationship and in our love. We are tethered together in this world, not only by the invisible hand of fate and the conspiring of the universe but by choice. It is my choice to be tied to you every day until the end of time, just as it is your choice to be tied to me. Scarce a thing in life is constant, but I know that no matter the trials and tribulations, on the days I bound out of the bed and the days I pull the covers back over my head, on these days alike, my choice to love you will be constant.
Let my heart be the one you call home.
Your beauty is comparable to a fiery volcano, to a well-worn patched quilt, to a flower blossoming at the top of the tallest mountain, and to the clouds which shift ever temptuous.
I can't stop thinking of the feeling of the pad of your hand on mine yesterday afternoon. Can we hold hands for the rest of our life? I will burn up from the sweetness of it I think.
My parents always told me that love never shrinks, it only multiplies. That when you meet someone and love them, the love in your heart isn't parceled out and divided and the portions for those you loved already don't subtract. Instead, your heart grows and you realize you are capable of adding even more love, of an infinite amount of love.
They said love never shrinks but sometimes it hides if you've been hurt. Sometimes the people we love hurt us and wound us very deeply, they told me. Sometimes we love those who are incapable of loving back. Sometimes we lose people in the worst of ways. They said it's okay for our hearts to go into hiding for a while, to rest and recover. They said that a strong heart never gives up. It heals, it forgives, it loves anew.
For a long while, it felt like my heart spent all its preoccupations hiding and hunched over, and I'm afraid it declined much since my youth. My heart is very weak now. There are stitches and scars along fragile veins. Love has not been easy for me. I try to believe what my parents told me about the ability of our hearts to heal, about the ability of love to defy the finite, but life has been very long. Still, my faith is the strongest when I'm with you. The weary wailing rhythm of my heart speeds up into a joyous beat. It crawls out of hiding into the sun once more and I believe I can love with an infinite love again.
You are my stalwart defender. You protect my heart as if it is your own. You have loved me so richly and so well that I now know a healing love. I can never thank you enough, for you have saved me on a spiritual level and restored me to the innocence of my youth. I can only pledge to love you as fiercely as you have loved me, to consider your heart as my own, to protect it fervently against all malice even mine own failings, and to heal it as mine has been healed with patience, devotion, and kindness.
When the sun shines on your face, when the moonlight hits your eyelashes, my breath stumbles in my throat, my heart skips a step, and I am overcome by your radiance.
Feet kick out over a dark abyss. They swing back and forth, into the light, out to the shadow, disappearing and reappearing with a quickness matching the thrum of my chest. I can look at you here in safety but I don't. I only steal quick glances at the silhouette of your face. We shouldn't be here. We shouldn't be here, but the door was unlocked and there was a smile on your face and these days it seems my primary joy is to extend your happiness as much as I can.
The sun rises every day, even if we cannot see it for the clouds, and with the sun, my love rises too. Every day I love you for the first time anew.
You are not the same person who I first met, and I am not the same either. We are constantly changing, after all. We wake up each day as strangers and as soulmates both. It's been a decade and a decade more and I'm so grateful for all the times I've fallen in love over and over again with every version of you. We have grown together, grown better, grown stronger, grown kinder. Yet I also look back on our past selves with love, delight, and compassion. At each stage, we worked to be right for each other and we are all the better for it now. Here's to yet another decade of evolution, love.
Maybe it's the end of the world. Most days I wake up and I think that it is. I stumble through the darkness. I grasp at your hand. Your hand is the only thing tethering me still. The sky in my mind's eye burns an angry, smoky red. I haven't seen a patch of blue since the funeral. Grief clouds cognition and smothers the spirit. Is there a word for the taste of fear? What of hopelessness? I do not deny I am in the worst state I've ever been in. I do not deny that I am paralyzed with sadness. But you are helping more than you know. You are a savior, a safe haven in the apocalypse of my mind. I sit in ruin and you sit there with me. And there, stricken in the rubble, I find a bit of hope in your eyes.
Where did all the simple, lovely love letters go? I am not a simple person, but I love with a simple love. I love with a singular love. I love you for strange, ineffable, magical, mysterious reasons, reasons written in the fabric of the universe at the conception of creation, but I also love you for the most mundane of motivations. I love the way part of your hair falls in front of your face, a little bit and then all at once. I love the way you paint, obsessing over every stray stroke. I love your face when it crinkles into concentration and how you ever so slightly bite the bottom left of your lip. I love your understated passion, the energy you emanate when you're quietly excited about something. I love your way with words, your whimsical wit, your smile after I laugh at your jokes. I love the way you look at me. It takes my breath away.
I love how you and I combine into an us. I love our gold-spun dreams. I love how we can talk for hours or sit in silence just the same. I love our banter and debates, our discussions and discourse, how we always fight to understand each other. I love how we communicate, how we can feel each other's energy shifts and know exactly how to change to complement, how we always know the right time to leave a function. A brief touch to the shoulder, a slight side glance, and we make excuses to our friends, sing praises to the host, and drive back home to rest. I love how we stand up for each other, that we give each other courage in conflict. I love the confidence in our love, how at the end of the day, you will always love me, and I will always love you. I know I will love you until the end of my life, and even after that.
This is how the story goes. Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, just a few footsteps too soon. Leander and Hero drown due to desperation. Romeo and Juliet die alone. This is how the story goes. We always lose the ones we love.
This is how the story goes. I meet you. I meet you on a park bench as dusk starts to set in and a crowd of teenagers rush by to catch the last bus. I meet you on a crowded subway as you stumble at a stop and your shoulder brushes mine. I meet you in a bookstore with the smell of parchment clinging to the air as we reach for the same book. In every life, I meet you and I fall I fall I fall.
You have the kind of face and wit and wink that makes me pace and sit and think that forever isn't long at all.
This is what love means to me. To love is to be changed and to change in turn. To love is to open more than your heart, it is to open up your time, your life, your soul. It is to realize that you may be hurt very badly, that you are more vulnerable now than you are comfortable with. It is to put in the work, to sacrifice, to value someone else equal and greater to yourself. It is also necessary to have a deep love for yourself, to be confident that if you love another and they misuse that love, that you are enough to heal and move forward.
I've thought about love for a long time, about what it means to me to love someone. I've thought about what love gives, yes, but also what it demands, what it necessitates. Love needs forgiveness and patience to endure. I don't mean to sound overly solemn in this letter, although I know I do, because love is also fun. Love has duality. It is a heavy feather and a light millstone. You taught me that. I have so, so much fun loving you. But it's true, I've always felt a pull towards the duty of love, I've always felt its consequences and I've taken them seriously. After all, anyone can love. I think that's one of the most beautiful things about humanity. But not all love is the same. I once read a book where a rich celebrity father abandoned his children, even after he learned they were orphans after their mother passed. Years went by and they met again in a freak twisting of fate and he said that he loved them. And the eldest daughter, who fought her whole life to feed, shelter, protect, and love her siblings, said something that I felt profoundly convicted by. She said that she knew her father loved them, but the truth was that his love didn't mean very much. All love has beauty to it, but all love is not made equal. I say this all to promise you that when I say I love you, it means something real. I want my love to be more than words or a feeling I hide in my own heart. Words are wind. Actions are actions. By my actions, I hope you know how much I love you. I hope I live up to my convictions and I hope you can forgive me when I falter. I love you wildly. I respect you beyond measure. I consider you constantly. And I laugh with you. I laugh with you every day. I think you're hysterical and charming and cute and the sight of your smile still sends my heart spinning. That is the duality of love. That is what love means to me.
Build oh build with me a castle in the air. They say our situation is impossible. They say our love seems doomed to die. I'm afraid that everyone's a cynic now. Where did all the dreamers go? It's just you and I against the world. So darling, blow me a dandelion kiss, brush your lips against a falling star. Wishes do come true and there are castles in every cloud. Stretch your wilted wings - they hid them from you! - and fly on up to me my love, we will sup there on daydreams and nightmares alike.
I'll write you a love letter for every season. You can cast it on a line and fly it as a kite on the gentle spring winds. You can stick it between the pages of your new book with sandy summer suntanned fingers before you rise to dance amongst the waves. You can hold it tight as the autumn leaves swirl and a swaddling Jack Frost nips at your nose. And you can leave it on the counter next to the hot chocolate when the doorbell rings because this winter, this winter I'm coming home.
You are the end of me. I rise with those wax wings ever closer to your sunshine like Icarus before me. I embrace the bittersweet sting of pomegranate willingly, six seeds tying me to hell and yet also to you. I steal fire from the gods, I fall from their favor for the hope of gaining yours. I guide you through the labyrinth with my golden string all to only glean a glimpse of the billow of your sails as you steer your ships away. You are the end of me, but my love endures for love is not born of reciprocation. Love is.
I don't miss anyone but I miss you.
I belong to you. You belong to the world.
What can I say about love that has not been said a thousand times over? I confess I worried the page between my fingers, worried my lip between my teeth, and worried worrisome thoughts in my head over how I should write my love down for you. Because you deserve the very best of love letters, the most eloquent words that make your heart flutter and make the world seem brighter. You deserve something profound and striking, but I worried and worried for what more can be said about love?
And then I realized that your heart is so aligned with love as a force of the world that you would find delight in my struggle because it means that people have been contemplating and expressing love for so long that nearly everything under the sun has been said. It is a beautiful thing that love has been pondered so deeply as to produce its own cliches.
And I also realized that no matter how cliche, what I write here is unique and unrepeatable because it is an expression of my soul's longing for yours. If people in the future read this letter, they may perhaps feel their hearts reverberate and resonate with these words, and I hope they do, but the love I give, I give it just to you.
I do believe in the strings of fate and the machinations of the universe. How can I not believe in an invisible tether knowing all the ways we were bound together in secret, all the ways our lives have prepared us for each other? The more I get to know you, the plainer it seems that we were meant to be. And more than that, not to place myself above the universe's ordinances, but more than that, I choose to love you and would love you even if the universe divined to keep us apart.
The problem with writing letters and the restriction of my writing you letters and not poems is a restriction imposed only by my own talents. I am afraid that I am hopelessly bad at poetry as of now. I can never put together words in a beautiful abstract way such as the greats do. I think perhaps it is because I do not by nature deal well with abstracts and certainly not abstracts in the way of love. I am not a flower and you are not a honey bee. I am me and you are you. I need you and I want you and we are meant to be. Those are the words flowing through my head when I think of you, simple simple certainties, not nature inspired metaphors. But I know you. I might not know anything else but I know you. And I know your heart does so sigh at a bit of love poetry and so I practice and practice every night and one day I will write something worthy of you.
I didn't think you were my type but one day, you were sitting across the table from me and I realized I couldn't look directly at your face for too long. I was startled and unprepared, like a colt trying out its wobbly legs for the first time. I felt like a cliche. I kept sneaking glances, drinking in how the sun danced across your skin, feeling unworthy, unworthy of your gaze. You were so radiant in those moments that I had to look away, my head was dizzy from your beauty. I can't remember what you looked like now, but I remember what it felt like to forget to breathe.
I wanted to write something new so you know my feelings are not passing from passionate to phlegmatic. In fact, my feelings are stronger than ever. I did not conceive it possible, but I grow more obsessed with you every day. And I do not use that word obsession lightly. You invade my mind, all of my thoughts are starting to stop at you.
I'm beginning to see the world differently, to see things through your eyes. I notice small and beautiful things I didn't before. A child helping an elderly woman wipe coffee from the floor. A wispy cloud traversing a spotless sky. A heart stone shaped river water smooth. I also see sadnesses I was blind to. My heart has grown softer and my actions kinder in response. Before you, I would retreat and feel the world get colder but now even injustices make life burn brighter. I am alive when I once slept, how could I not be obsessed?
We have been together both a heartbeat and half a lifetime. Childhood friends and then this. My love for you has changed, I have not loved you the same way through the years but I have always, always loved you.
Is love always baked in tragedy? Is it always forged with tears? I hate having our incompatibilities pointed out over and over by the people who know us best. I hate loving you in such hopelessness. I'm tired of fighting the stars, of fighting our families, of fighting destiny. I feel like in every other universe we were not meant to be and maybe in this one too we happened against impossible odds. We wrested Cupid's arrows away and cast our own. Can love grow weary? I have grown weary of the injustice of it all. Why is our love not enough, why must it be proved? Why must we fight for what others take for granted?
This is still a love letter, although it's a tired one. I know you grow weary, too. It's true we are burdened by our circumstances but I do not regret my love of you for even the heartbeat of a hummingbird. Loving you is the greatest thing I've ever done and being loved by you is the greatest thing I've ever known. Love is not always an easy road to walk, but it is one you never have to walk alone. I know our love is pure. It is not corrupt or wicked or wrong. I know we fit together and that our lives are both better together than apart. So let the fight continue in love. Let us escape and rest and then return and love until they see what we see. Let them see how we love each other, how we love our families, how we love our communities, and how we love our world. A fight fought in love is a battle never lost. And there's no one I would rather fight by than you.
I think I love you. I said on a starless night in a field of flowers and cicadas. I said when you clumsily guided a duckling back to the fold. I said under the glow of the moon with waves lapping our feet. I said after hours upon days in cold white waiting rooms. I think I love you I think I love you I think I love you I said a dozen times, a million times. And a dozen times, a million times, in sweetness and in strife, "I know I love you" rang out in reply.
I'm so like absurdly fucking in love with you.
I've always wanted reciprocity. Isn't that all most people want in the end? To love and be loved with equal fervor. How nice it must be to get what one wants in love. My fingernails are chipped and ragged from trying to stop the fall, but each time it comes and it is a solitary exercise. I fall alone. I talk myself in circles saying it's not love it's not love it's not love. It's just a passing fancy, the feelings will leave, we aren't even compatible. I suppose I want to make myself feel better because I know I am lying. Because every time I remember all the ways we don't make sense, I can't forget that I've never loved anyone else the way I've loved you.
I know I said I've fallen many many times, but I think that's another lie I've been telling myself. I'm still in free fall from the first time. Or sometimes I feel like I've been crawling out of a pit, only to look up and realize I've only reached another ledge. I can see the sky above, see the clouds pass through the stars at night, see a hawk's wingspan against the sun, and those glimpses give me false hope. What a faithless universe where I reside where it seems you were made for me but I not for you.
I missed you, if I'm even allowed to say that. I missed you every day we were apart and I would tide myself over with thoughts of your return. I don't know if I'm allowed to miss you so strongly. I feel incomplete without you and that makes me unsteady. I have never felt so tied to another soul. I am truly glad you are living your life fully and know I am not owed any attention while you are away. But I clung to the hope that your thoughts drifted to me sometimes.
I fear my own thoughts are anchored to you. Even the monotony of life can hardly distract me. After a long day of work, I headed to the store and idled with the business of picking this tomato from that. But when I left, I looked up and saw how the stars twinkled so gently against the harsh streetlights and I thought of you looking at the night sky. Although oceans apart, at least our window to the universe was still the same. The truth is every beautiful thing reminds me of you and so I missed you rather constantly.
Each visit ruins me. I can say that with certainty. I busy and bustle and hurry and fuss in preparation for your visit. No matter how anxious or stressed, I become the peak of productivity in anticipation of you. Yet in the days that follow, I fall behind. I sleep more. I daydream. I'm listless. I replay every conversation, every moment we shared. I unfold and fold these memories until they're worn and frayed at the edges. I try to remember all my jokes and if you laughed. I write down every childhood anecdote, every insight into your life. I commit it all, I inscribe it upon my heart. I don't know if this is love, but I know it must be longing. And the longing consumes my mind and soul until every thought is tinged with you.
I've never been a very brave person. In the past, I've had three words caught in the back of my throat, trapped in the gap between my teeth. But for you, I don't even have that. I cannot even put letters to my longing. I'll chase the sound of your laugh for the rest of my days.
Cool wind. Yellow wheelbarrow. Sunlight on a library book. My face was smaller then, but everyone says I still look the same. Childhood is such a funny thing. Some parts slip away like butter in a bathtub. Others cling on tight like marshmallow foam on a rim. My mom used to dump out lotion in her empty bath and let us slide around like penguins. Sliding soothed away the cracks in our dry skin and the cares of the day. I never thought of her hands back then. How they carried small cracks from a childhood of her own. I think about it now, though. What memories does she keep forever, and which ones slide away?
I think about my aunt a lot. A lot is such an interesting pair of words. It is as vague as such a descriptive phrase can get, and is a set as subjective as any batch of words can be. Is a lot too much? Or is it not enough? A lot is how many aunts I have. My mom was the last child of nine. She has three brothers and five sisters. My dad has one sister. So I have six aunts. I had a lot of aunts growing up. Too much? Or not enough? I think about my aunt a lot. I think about how much she loved to read. I think about how much she loved to sing. I think about how much she loved and was loved. And I cry sometimes because she left an indelible mark. And because she's the reason I know the word indelible. She loved to drink huge jugs of water, icy cold. It was so cold it would nip and pinch at your throat going down. She would drink in between passages of Nancy Drew to clear her throat. And to clear her thoughts, she would go for a smoke every few chapters. My books would have water stains on a few pages and smell like cigarettes faintly. Some pages would have dog ears and spines never quite shut the same way again. But I loved them, and I still have them. I tell stories about my aunt a lot. Too much? Or not enough? I tell stories about how we called her the Queen of Fun. I talk about how she almost flew off her feet running down that steep stone mountain hill with a Kroger buggy filled to the brim with ice to cool the pool down. I talk about how she would sing us to sleep except she was never good at it because she would keep cracking jokes. I remember how she would leave the door cracked to return again and again to tell us just one more funny before we went to sleep. We would giggle relentlessly when she would sing stay awake, don't close your eyeBALLS! Bedtimes were never really a hard and fast rule with her anyway. I remember how she would play bubble shooter for hours. How she always had a hair tie somewhere in her massive purse. How she would withdraw stacks of her retirement money to take us to Six Flags. I cried secretly the first time I saw those metal tracks snake alongside the highway after her death, taken aback in the back of a blue car, speeding away from the natural state of things, grief uneclipsed. I rarely heard her cry, but when I did, it was in huge gasping sobs. She never did anything in half-measure. She loved cheese, so much that she kept blocks of sharp and extra sharp cheese in her purse, right under the everest of hair ties. She hated snakes and creepy crawlies. She loved to give whatever she could. She loved to laugh. She hated being upset. She joked she was the founding member of the itty bitty titty club. She said she would hide under laundry piles with a book and flashlight as a kid to avoid doing chores. She would quickly replace shit with the word defecate when our Mom was near. Yeah, I have a lot of stories. Too much? Or not enough? I have a lot of memories, but sometimes I can't remember exactly what she sounded like when she laughed, even though she laughed all the time. I can remember how sick she looked, how her skin seemed to fall off her body and how her hair was thin and brittle. I still remember her smile though because it was there even near the end. I remember that big toothy grin and how it would stretch across her face and how it was as wide as an ocean. I remember a lot. But is a lot too much, or not enough?
I haven't been able to write to you much lately. I don't think I'm in love with you anymore. I wish I could see you as before, two strangers in the street.
You are the sky and all of its stars. You had my heart from the beginning. You have my days til the end. I am yours.
They say write what you know. All I write about is you.
I beg your lips to still themselves, I implore your eyes to flutter shut, lest I forget myself entirely and fall in love with you.
Am I a boat that you have unmoored me so? You have entrapped me with your gentle demeanor and the quiet crinkles around your eyes.
I will suffer nothing less than true love.
No one ever told me how tiring being in love can be. I am exhausted. I am worn thin. Every dimension of my existence is wrapped around you and I have faded away.
New year new me but every me is in love with every you so I guess I'm still fucked.
I can't help but love you.
I don't think there's anything left for me in this life. I think I've done everything all wrong sometimes. I just don't know what to do anymore.
fuck it, let's go for broke
I've started wishing I could go back in time. I've been driving myself mad thinking that maybe I missed my chance. There was a moment when my seat was ever the empty space next to you. Did you love me then? I'm sorry if I played it too coy. You should know that I was delighted every time you wanted me, in whatever way you did. Was it just infatuation? I thought that was my affliction, but time has not tempered my affection for you. God, if there was ever a moment that you loved me or if even the shadow of attraction skirted your heart, I hate myself for missing it. I'm nothing but an addict now. I bask in the memories of your past affections. I crave their renewal.
I wanted you the second I saw you. I know that's not original (but it's true).
It's not fair to fall in love with someone you aren't compatible with. And yet.
I have this nervous tick that shows up every time I see you. My heart just starts thumping thumping thumping inside my chest. Well, doc, what's your prognosis?
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery. I know you so well I steal swollen sentences before they pass your lips. I take them for myself. I gorge myself on them. I think it unnerves you a little. It unnerves me, too. All that love I've shoved and stuffed in a blender. Isn't that understandable?
I made a girl cry once because I told her magic didn't exist. I was being a dick about it. I've always struggled with the supernatural, though I have a healthy respect for it. (You won't find me fucking around with an Ouija board, that's for sure.) There very well could be a spirit world, and my third eye has been sleeping. Yet, the moment you open your palms, I am as avid a fortune teller as any. I sigh supplications into the subtle chasms of your hands. I trace every callous and commit it to memory. As for the back of your hand, I know it better than the back of my own. Although I cannot claim to know your heart better than you do, I can promise to hold it closer than any other.
And so I promise you the rest of my sunsets if you will be at the last.
And if all else I say is a lie, then let this be the one truth, that I have never loved anyone as I love you.
I'll never forget the sound of your voice
Fat and full
Of morning rasp and affection.
I know you as a blind person knows their name. Each contour and curve unobstrusive to a stranger, but to me, each scar and wrinkle, a universe.
And I should think we are bound - not by some effervescent thread of fate - but by starlight. For we are all made of stardust, and you and I of the same shining star.
I am the spider that spun
the witch who won
Your heart through devious scheme
I am lately not in love.
I love in liminal spaces. On a plane right as it lands and the wheels scrape the ground and your shorts ride up to reveal half a tattoo. On a train as it sparks to a stop, you trip over your own feet to avoid crashing into a child. In elevator shafts before the ding sounds. As you glance at your analog watch with a worried wince. As the clock hand shifts to midnight and the magic starts to shy away.
I fall in love at all the wrong times.
At the last second, and a second too late.
I miss you more than anything. I don't know what I did wrong, but I'm sorry. Please come back.
I have a thing for seeing you in the sunlight, I think. Some say you seem ethereal, but they're wrong. When the sunlight hits your face, you look like the earth come to life. You stand there, carelessly primordial - skin a perfect golden glow, wrist warm to the touch, and light sticking to your lips. I kiss you to taste the sun.
So then, even though it has been weeks upon months, I still think about you every day and there are many spaces your shadow continues to haunt.
It takes a long time to unlearn a person
But time is a patient mistress
And, in an instant, two are wed
Nothing is in more agreement with Einstein's theory of relativity than grief. Not even a train and an idiot. The rest of the world hurtles on.
I still dream about you all the time. Your apparition a balm and a fright in turn.
The soul has a shape
And grief an occupation
A sculptor whose supple hands
Have no scruples
Betray no moritfication
At the cuts that litter the vessel
At the shards that fly to the floor
At the destruction of what once was
Shameless in the revelry of creation
You don't see yet.
But you will.