nobody lights candles in cold rooms to feel warmer. they have always just been a symbol to the type of warmth we cannot feel on our skin. they are not necessary, but they bring me peace i do not know how to find elsewhere.
it is similar with the letters i write to you. they are never needed in order for you to know of my affection, but they are the vessel all the extra words land in when the love i feel for you in silence spills through my hands.
you are a most constant companion to my reoccurring thoughts. you have infiltrated my defenses, and built a home somewhere between the left and right side of my ribs. i am overcome by your presence, and yet the thought of you never grows tired in me. it returns to me like a tide. it rinses me clean. i feel as though a part of the heaviness has been lifted off my chest, and i know, without logic, that it is because i have you to come home to
love as i understood it is the feeling of all the good the world has to offer, all while standing at the edge of something tall. something so fragile and large must always come with the risk of slipping and falling to unthinkable depths. and yet, i find myself newly held by a kind of feeling that makes me the furthest from vigilant, a kind that occupies my chest without contracting my lungs.
i am constantly struck with all that you are. you make me steady, you make me consequential. you unravel me, and cover me. you have a way of speaking that changes the temperature of my body, and declare the things i once treated as fragile with such certainty i almost feel certain of myself again. certain, that i exist. that i am here. that i am not something in constant need of questioning.
it is difficult to describe without ruining it. and about this, i must confess, in blush,
if you continue to call me beautiful as often as you do, with that maddening ease, with that quiet insistence, i think you may succeed in rewriting me. i think i will begin to believe you without argument. one day, i will catch myself wearing your words as if they were my own skin, and i will not remember the day you changed me.
i love you with frightening devotion. it startles me for being so unguarded, so uninterested in being clever. i love you in a way that has taken my pride, and made me want to be gentler with everything, including myself. there is no explanation to it, and no bigger words i could use. but i live it daily from the way i brush my teeth at dawn to the way i tie up my hair come nightfall. i cannot help but love you. it is one of the easiest things i have ever done.
if only i could give you all you have given me, it would be the furthest thing from an object. maybe a home for you to carry. a place to find shelter and warmth, a place to rest, a place to be small.
i cannot promise perfection, but i can promise to keep choosing you, even when i am tired, even when the world is sharp, even when i am all out of words to say what i feel.
to love is always to choose.
thank you for finding me. thank you for staying.
thank you for being mine in this quiet, miraculous way that still does not feel real when i say it out loud.