i've had love in all its forms but one.

i have the love of my sister who i grew up with, of my friends i adventured with, of my associates i worked with. but the one love i've never had is from a lover. that intimate form of affection and respect and confidence. the one that's so markedly different from the affection of my sister, the confidence of my friends, the respect of my associates. 

i cannot tell how it is different, i simply know that it is. and i believe you do, too. we all feel it – the specialness of a lover's love. 

i've never had that love. and eons of craving the love i only read in books, hear in songs, or see in movies, i often dream about the partner i'll have and the love that we'll share. 

it's very much like the love between solé and viktor – the kind that's steadfast and strong, tender and burgeoning. the kind that stalks across hell and swims through highwater.

maybe this perfect, unwavering, warm, and timeless kind of romance is unrealistic, but the heart wants what the heart wants, and i'm sure there are others like me who crave this, too.

so, this little novelette is a chunk of my heart dedicated to me, because i know the love i want and the love that i'm capable of giving. this is dedicated to all the lonely people, the romantics, the seekers.

i dedicate this to my sister for reading random paragraphs when i asked for an extra pair of eyes and still fawning over my babies. i dedicate this to GrimmInker and chrysthh for being with me from the beginning and sticking around for the ending.

most of all, i dedicate this to the writers and the lyricists and the poets and the painters who taught me what the purest romantic love can be like.

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❝ I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don't really resent it. ❞

➳ an excerpt from a love letter Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf

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and thank you, everybody who ever reads this novelette.