Giving has always been how I’ve shown love.
After a fight with my mum at eleven years old, I made her a stop-motion video spelling out ‘I’m Sorry’, each letter a different pattern and colour. I picked out a blown glass necklace to match my grandma’s favourite shirt, scarves with silver foil detailing like the ones I had seen in my mum’s closet. I thought hard about the way my dad smelled, and tested each cologne and body wash on the shelves until I found one that smelled that way.
I think there’s something so intimate about it. It’s a form of proof, in a way. Proof of listening and of noticing; I have listened to the things you love, I have noticed the colours you wear and what makes you breathless with excitement. The closest you can get to omniscience and the knowing of a person. I know you well enough to hold something physical in my hands and see you there. I know you well enough to have that confidence, to foresee the smile on your face and the watery eyes.
And there’s something so thrilling about getting it right. With their glassy eyes, there is also a certain realisation, that you know them like this, and that you love them like this. The proof is in the present. I like that idea of stunning people with my love for them, with how I’ve listened and stored away titbits of information, strived for perfection and personalisation.
I bought my friend, who is a feminist, a pair of earrings inspired by Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s white collar. I bought my Geography major friend some 1970s National Geographic magazines, and a bauble made of vintage maps. I bought my selenophile best friend a necklace with the moon from the first night we met. I got my girlfriend a gold pendant for her birthday that was engraved with ‘pretty girl’ in my handwriting, and I sent her all the drafts where I’d written the words out again and again and tried to make it perfect.
But there’s something too about a letter. About giving somebody your words and perceptions like that; your thoughts in black ink, on lined paper. My best friend sent me a letter with a purple wax seal and all these little doodles of flowers. She told me she was just going to pick up the paper and write what she thought; she told me I was full of warmth and joy and sunshine. Even though she was living really far away, she felt so close like that. I could hear her, touch the ink laced with her own touch and her own heart.
So I decided to try my hand at writing to my girlfriend.
And now I can’t stop writing. I make myself cry with the love letters I write her. The words just seem to tumble from my mouth like flowers, converted from daydreams and romantic thoughts into rose and hyacinth ink. And this kind of automatic writing process, so driven by emotion and my love for her, always makes me emotional. I’ve never written so well, or so fast, than when I’m writing to her and for her. I write about flowers and the future and how I have been changed by loving her. I always spray them with my perfume, so she can smell the vanilla through the envelope. Or I put on red lipstick and kiss them right on the bottom corner.
I’m saying ‘I love you’. These are all ways of saying ‘I love you’.