Telling You 'I love you' Just Doesn't Do it Anymore

To Write About Loving You

The truth is, being with you can't be real.

It's disjointed statements like this that are the closest I can get to explaining what it feels like to be with you.

It's why poems are infected with metaphors, because the closest you can get to expressing what it feels like to love and be loved (with a love that's more than love) is to describe around it. Love- adjacent concepts, and hope your listeners have had the privilege of experiencing love so they'll be prompted to connect the dots.

There is the conflict to talk up the one we love and the effect they have on us, to speak with such grandiose, but while the grandiose pays homage to how intense the experience, in reality, there is also a simultaneous quiet and natural feeling to it all.

I'm writing now, so fast and strained, trying to capture the words as I think them in fear I won't have them another second, and no one will ever know how he makes me feel. My hands grow sore from gripping my pen, which moves in quick and rushed motions, but the soreness is nothing new. My muscles strain and ache like an old jacket I haven't slipped into in a while.

There I go. His smile is blinding like the sun, warm and inviting, but impossible to look at directly for so long. And his eyes, like warm coffee but also like the ever growing and expanding universe.

It's in the metaphors. And call me a hypocrite, please, because I stop you from making claims in the moment that feed me impossible promises covered in the sweet moment that calls for it. And I've been burned by blind acceptance, so I tell you to speak carefully, and throw myself into the metaphors. Because it's safe, because being "like" something doesn't bind you to "defining" something.

But I should give up on defining and expressing and claiming, because it never quite gets it right. Even still, I keep trying. I keep writing, poem after poem, in hopes that I either succeed in explaining how you make me feel, or lines in my cumulative works poke holes through the confines of written language, and you're able to see me.

Because how can I put to words something as simple and natural as peace? I try to describe it as transcendent, miraculous, life-changing. But these all over complicate what is in reality laying in bed with you. To take the objective approach, my heart steadies. My mind goes quiet. I am only focused on the feeling of your fingertips grazing my skin as you fight sleep. That is all that is happening, and yet it is everything to me.