The Ways In Which I Will Love You

I will love you with everything I have. I may never be able to tell you how I feel, but I will love you with a heart possessed of lunatic fervency regardless. I will love you wildly and I will love you deeply. I will love you bodily. I will love you in a way that clicks in every step I take on the pavement, in a way that relieves me every time I scratch an itch, in a way that bounces back unruly every time I brush a fly away hair from my face. I will love you so much that some part of me will love you forever.

I will love you like family. I will love you unconditionally, and not just because you love me unconditionally. I will love you because of the years we’ve spent cradled in each other’s warm embraces, in each other’s tears and in each other’s laughter. I will love you so much I will challenge your perception of me everyday, and your understanding and persistence will make me love you more. I will love in a way that renders me silent when I want to scream; I will be stoic and hard when you need me to be, and I will never complain. I will be all the things you want me to be, and I will never fail to find my way to your side when you are calling for me. I will protect you with the violence of a madman, and I will willingly, nay, happily die for you, if only to see you smile. My heart will beat for you every single day, and even when we’re miles apart, I will love you unfalteringly. Sometimes, I will cry because I love you so much.

I will love you because I have to. Even though I don’t know you very well, you are part of me. Your blood is pulsing crimson in my veins; your small feet live tellingly at the ends of my short legs, which I believe are yours too. I will love you just as intensely as I would love anyone else, because you are my history. Without you I would not be me, and I will love you for that. I will love you mildly, rationally, and from a distance. But I will love you; in away that is less about you and more about us.

I will love you recklessly. I will love every little detail of you, the enlarged pores on your nose, the sprinkle of freckles across your cheek and the way you push your lips together and inhale deeply as you break in your storytelling. I will love you so much I will drink these details as though they were gloriously intoxicating, and I will etch them out in my mind and play them back to myself like old record when you’re gone. I will commit myself to you wholly; I will let you possess me. I will love you in such a way that parts of me will become you and I will hold on to those parts as though they were secrets whispered in gold.

I will love you as though you were the only person I’d ever loved. I will love you intensely, I will throw myself around you recklessly and if you love me back I will be humbled. I will love you so much I will try to be a better person every day. I will work harder, smile more, love better—all because of you. Despite this, the way I love you will be effortless, it will fit me like my summer skin, glowing in your presence. I will love you boundlessly and unselfishly, and my love will not be metered by your love for me. I will love you irrespective of everything.

I will love you fleetingly. I will love you in my bed for one night; I will love you for a few short days in Paris or a week in London. I will love you sitting on my stoop one drunken night. I will love you even if I never see you again, and I will love you just as passionately as I’ve ever loved, if only for a moment. I’ll recall you tenderly in the stories I will tell for the rest of my life, and I will love you retrospectively. I will love you like a ghost, like a flower that has bloomed and died; I will love you with an inconceivable abandon. I will love you as achingly and deeply as I can in the short amount of time we’ve been allotted.

I will love you in all these ways because I can. I will love you because it’s lovely to love you. I will love you because whether you are my mother, my best friend, the love of my life or a one-night stand, I think you’re perfect. I will love you because you’ve made my life more wonderful by simply being it. I will love you because I don’t know what else to do, and I don’t know if there is another name for this feeling, or if I really want there to be another name for it. I will love you because there isn’t enough love in the everyday. I will love you because I love loving, and because you deserve to be loved.