An Open Letter To My Lover: Volume I

Hey you,

I'm not big on Valentine's. However, I am big on love. So, here we are.

It's funny. They call me a writer, but my mind becomes incapable of coherent thought if I am writing to you. Almost as if my words cannot convey what my heart contains. Perhaps that is why I borrow from others' compositions so often, hoping they have already said what I cannot even begin to fathom yet.

People are always surprised when I tell them I have never been in love. "Not even a silly childhood crush you laugh about now?", they ask. It's difficult to explain it to them. Difficult explaining how I am supremely old-fashioned about giving away my love. How there is only one key for this lock. How settling for anything other than the one, even if it is just to bide time, will be a tragedy. I'm hoping they will understand when they see us together.

I will never understand though, why the world continually fixates on falling in love. You fall into ruin. But darling, you and me, we will rise in our love. We will sustain in our love. We will prevail in our love. Even when we perish, we shall ascend; even when time passes us by, our infinities will never end.

For all my big talk, I don't want to disillusion you. I can be pretty difficult to love, I think all of us are at some point, you know? Neruda wrote in what has now become one of my favorite poems: Woe is me, woe is us, my dearest: we wanted only love, to love one another, but among so many griefs it was fated that only we two would be so hurt. I could tell you that life would be a Nicholas Sparks story, sappy and fanciful with a guaranteed happy ending, but Wuthering Heights is so much poignant than The Notebook, wouldn't you say?

You should know I have been looking for you. Trying to find you in the sonnets I read, or the couples I see walking on the street. In hot chocolates and starry nights; on beachfronts and in the pieces I write. And even though you seldom take form in my reveries, I sleep easy, because I know, wherever you may be, we lie under the same stars.

When I do meet you though, I'll never need you to complete me. Neither will I need you to complement me. I live wholly by myself, even in my imperfection. What I need from you is you. True, glorious, a hundred-percent of you. Because baby, you aren't supposed to be an add-on; you're meant to be the damn centerpiece.