I wrote this for you last year. I used to write love letters often. I remember we went to East Side King’s that day. I remember I got a rose on campus and gave it to you. You asked me if I told my parents that I had a Valentine. I said, “Do I have one?” Then I said, “Do your parents know?” And you said, “Of course they do.” And I remember thinking that we were going to be okay.
Did you know that the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word for the color blue? I wonder how they described the sea, or the sky when it was a particularly blazing day. How did they say “I’m feeling terribly sad?” Maybe: “I’m feeling green.” Or “lavender”. Or maybe even “yellow” on opposite days, if they had those. Probably they just said, “I’m feeling terribly sad” without using colorful euphemisms.
Someone once told me that English has the most euphemisms for death out of every language. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but there are over a thousand words for death in the Historical Thesaurus. Isn’t that strange? Every language should have a word for death. And love. And snow and compassion and that spot on my neck that’s too sensitive. We should have words for everything so we don’t feel alone. We need very specific words for all the different kinds of sad, and even more for all the kinds of happy. What if we were able to talk about everything? I want to tell you how I feel and I want to be precise. That’s my problem – I don’t say things that I should because I always want to arrange the words in my mind until they are perfect. That’s why I have this constant itch to write and write and fill up notebooks by the week. But there are some things I want you to clearly and definitively know, so I’m going to speak plainly now.
I like your smile. I like your hands and your hair and the way that it looks after you’ve just woken up. I like the way you laugh, especially when it sounds like it catches you off guard. I like how you sound when you talk about things you love. I think I just like how you sound in general. I like how sometimes you treat me so tenderly, even though it frightens me. I like how you treat others. I like your energy, and this is why we need more precise words, because right now “like” isn’t distinct enough.
Here is the whole point of everything I am trying to say: Spring is coming, and things are beginning to thaw. The nights are filled with a heartbreaking sweetness. Maybe I’m getting tired, but with you, midnight feels different. It feels early. It feels sunny. I think that life, in spite of everything, is a fairy tale.