i love you.
i love you the way a poet stares and scrutinizes his creations, hacking away the pieces he doesn't like
and then picks them up once more and weaves the words to become something a reader will admire and adore endlessly, falling into the pages to discover and create meaning from what had been admonished and abolished and redirected into beauty -
i know not of your past, of the mad scribblings that once would lie beneath the pages of your flesh and your heart,
but i so worship the present, dream and hope and wish for the future where our books will meld and the words "...happily ever after" will be written on our closing chapter,
i love you the way a fairytale lies yet inspires, children flapping the pages as if wings from the creatures that lie within and running off excited to tell their parents of the pretty princess and the brave knight who found her and made promises he was not to keep
the lessons they found are so like the morals you have shown me and the promises i shall keep, not as a secret, but like a garden
i love you the way flowers cannot survive without the sun, reaching their weary petals towards the light only to close once it is not there
fighting for survival so silently, slowly, in ways passerby can so easily ignore -
if you are my light and my way of life i will lean into your warmth forevermore and lord pray for any soul who attempts to shield me from it, from you
i love you the way a sailor swears, obsessively and lovingly, he swears his love
i love you like a sailor and the song that declares it so
i love you the way floridians love and miss the snow
i love you as if it were a temple and yet
i love you like a dewdrop that pulls down a blade of grass
and i love you like a pressed mushroom or an iridescent blade of glass
i love you how a purring cat reminds me of what was lost from my touch but never my heart
and i love you both in poverty and in wealth, both in sickness and in health, till death do us part.
i love you.

my girlfriend made me read this to her again after i read it initially bc it made her so happy it was so cute and made me so happy