Last updated on 8 December 2020
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“I love you with all my heart and soul.” – Jean Paul Sarte to Simone de Beauvoir.
my darling,
There is danger in loving someone else so completely that you become wholly enveloped by them. To love someone in this way–as I love you–is to let go of one’s ego and fears, like an insect casting off their old skin. There is a moment of complete vulnerability, where your heart is open, asking for your touch, gentle, subtle and warm, dear lover, pushing away all thoughts that love might not be returned. For I cannot love you any other way than to fully expose me to you in anticipation of full acceptance. Weather does not change you, even in times of cascades of rain or blustery force of blizzard. That much I have seen.
I did not trust in love for most of my life; my willingness to become a lover was unsophisticated as was my understanding of what constituted love. I simply did not know. I had never before you experienced the delicious spirit of love, a kind of “home fire” in the pit of my stomach that aches when I do not pay attention. We tread a fine line in real love, this space between joy and pain. Now that I have you, I see there is nothing else. That line is love, and while angst is sometimes a part, such when I feel you do not see me, without that pain there is none of the sublime joy that feeds me from breathing the same air and being let into your heart. I feel your unbounded heart, like a huge playroom with soft rounded walls so that when I bounce around, doing cartwheels and other gymnastics, there is nothing hard that jolts me. I am safe with you.
I loved you the moment we opened up to each other in that restaurant so long ago–and perhaps a few moments sooner–but I was an idiot in love because I didn’t know how far you would reach into my soul.
This love is a collective journey for you and I; we are in parallel, side-by-side, looking at the same world but also seeing things through different colored lenses. This I have begun to appreciate–that the world you see and experience through your orange-tinted lenses–can also be the world I see through my green or gray or turquoise. This is how love moves, when I let go of “my way” of expectation, because you make me feel good and are not threatening, and because your touch is like baby’s breath, I can love you more.
This was all a surprise to me. I loved you the moment we opened up to each other in that restaurant so long ago–and perhaps a few moments sooner–but I was an idiot in love because I didn’t know how far you would reach into my soul.
You show me the way time and time again; when the outside world interferes and I struggle to make sense of my ex and my kids and blending two families; everyone wanted to resist the combination of our lives into one house, especially our exes. You and I persevered with a kind of commitment to the feeling we felt, fed by this thing we thought to be love.
There was a time of cancer, when I feared my story was ending. You were unwavering, like some proverbial lighthouse on a wave-battered shore; You shone your light on me when in my heart I could not expect you to stay and “put up” with the kind of shadow cast by cancer over the future.
I woke up from the sedative-induced unconsciousness of surgery, when the doctor pulled my cancer and my kidney from my body, wanting only you. As I tried to rise to awareness, like wiping away thick layers of mud from a windshield, I called your name and wanted only you. I could be dead, I thought, and where are you for you are the only light that can bring me back to life.
This is how I have come to understand love. You are my definition and embodiment of all that love is. You are the candle in the dark times of my soul, the beacon that pulls me from the depths of my sometime depression falls.
My road, when I have to leave your warm circle, is paved with the feeling of you in my head. I can go about my business, earning my pay through this work I do, but your voice, the brightness of it, the tenor of your laugh, the heartwarming image of your bright smile, makes the miles bearable. I know I will return.
In my day, it is as if I am seeing things through your eyes; everything I experience when you are not with me is automatically “less than” because it is not shared with you. I cannot “telepath” this to you. My heart leaps to share these things I see.
And when I come home, it is all forgotten and I need only to breathe you in again. Our shared experience, you and I living our co-independent lives, is what matters most to me.
I will always protect your heart, for to disrespect your heart would be to rip out my own.
You have earned my love, indeed there is no one I respect more. I will always protect your heart, for to disrespect your heart would be to rip out my own. I do not exist without you any longer; this does not mean my breathing would cease if I were to lose you. I would exist…the way a stone experiences the sun and cold and everything else, unmoved, unchanging, just there. It does mean there would be no art, no music, no sun in life. You are the color in my world, the orange and gray of the outside of our home, the greens and browns and blues of our rooms; your love is the artwork on our walls and the music that comes from the speakers on our floor. As Amos Lee plays, I hear you sing to his vocals as I watch you wipe the counter after preparing a meal or baking something for my step-kids.
Everything is light. Everything is warm inside this place that is your love. My life is better because you are in this world. I don’t know if you know this: I love you more than air.
until soon and with gratitude,
your devoted husband.