I love you… goodness, are those words even enough? I can’t even begin to describe all these thoughts swimming around inside my head, these emotions pounding from every chamber of my heart, these feelings in every nerve that start somewhere in my spine and branch out to reach every last space in my body.
Every moment when I could be with you and I’m not seems wasted. At the beginning of this all, when I didn’t even believe in love, I wondered somewhere in the back of my mind if everything—how I’d awkwardly shove my hand into yours and in playful cruelty make you struggle a little to keep your thumb on top, how my eyelids would flutter as you kissed me softly and gently and only on the cheek, how beautiful I’d feel and how time seemed to stop when you looked at me that way—would eventually lose its initial rush, comforting and comfortable while exhilarating and exciting.
None of it is gone. If anything, everything has only intensified, gotten stronger. Everything you do—even more, everything you are—makes me so happy. Even when I’m crying and delirious and saying terrible things at 1:00 AM, I would rather it be with you than anyone else. Even those terrible few days I spent crying, it seemed, endlessly… I’d rather be crying about you than kissing anyone else.
I don’t really know how to tell you… I don’t have the words to explain how much you’ve changed my life. I grew up almost conditioned to doubt love, or to write off love, if it even existed, as something I didn’t need in my life. To me, love was counterfeit and temporary and another source of disappointment. I didn’t need any of that in my life. Then I met you. You, with your wonderful optimism and so full of believing. Even when I told you honestly how I felt about love and how much I doubted my own capacity to experience something too impossibly wonderful to be real… you held out for me. You never pressured me, never argued with me, you just waited as love for me grew in your heart and as love for you grew in mine.
I wish I had expressed myself more eloquently that one night in the library parking lot. We’d just gotten ice cream. I got banana, you got chocolate. Every blood vessel within me was pulsating so furiously that I thought I might explode. I almost plastered myself against your car door. I couldn’t hold your hand, I couldn’t pretend to be okay. Not when I was keeping something so important from you. You asked me what was wrong, I said it was a secret. And, well… everything else is somewhat of a blur to me. I just remember you sitting there in thought, my thinking that I’d scared you away, that this was awkward, that I was an absolute lunatic. And then you said it. You told me you loved me, and you kissed me.
I’ve never known what it’s like to feel this much. I never placed so much faith in one person before, never took so much stock in one relationship, never needed someone as badly as I need you. If I get hurt, it will probably be my fault for loving you too soon, or too purely, or too much. But I don’t care. I don’t care how much I get hurt because I know the kind of love we have and I believe in you and I believe in us. The kind of love that pulls at my heart and makes me miss you even when I’m in your arms, when not even a sheet of paper could fit between us. The kind of love that makes me covet knowledge of the future, not because I’m unsure of who I’m going to be with but because I want to see how the rest of my life looks with you in it. The kind that makes me always want more, not in the selfish lustful way but in the way that I wish I could be a better person for you, I wish I could talk to you all the time and not need sleep or anything else because I want to be there for you always. The kind that makes me wish time didn’t exist so that the alarm would never have to go off, that we would never have to get up and say goodbye.
So even if this is just a phase in our lives, even if I’m only your first love and not your last… I want you to know that I have never loved anyone the way I love you, and I doubt I will be able to, and I know it is highly likely that I will never want to. I want you to know that even if things change and plans change and dreams change and people change… nothing will change the way I love you and the way we are, right now, frozen in time. I want you to remember this kind of love, because I believe it is the best kind. The self-giving love, the one that fills you with so much emotion it spills out in tears, even in the absence of sadness. That is what you’ve enabled me to feel, that is what you’ve given me. I want to thank you for that. I want to thank you for everything.
Yours,
Even if you’re not always mine.
