"Oh, Kel. I know."
I have imagined this situation, the words I've just said out loud hundreds of times over the past two months. I wrote them down. I practiced saying them in the shower. I ran phrasing and timing past friends of mine. I planned how I could leave, quickly, when things went awry.
This is the one situation I didn't anticipate.
It's a hell of a thing, to tell someone "Here are all the ways that I'm broken" and have them still treat you, well, like a person. It's an even bigger thing to tell someone "Here are all the ways I'm broken" and have them say:
"Yes, I know. I love you anyway."
It leaves me speechless.
In the past I've written a lot about love. About how much I love it, how I feel it for my friends, how I wanted it despite someone tap-dancing on my heart. I wrote about how I need different words for love and how Upper Midwestern parents changed my conception of love.
This blog has many, many entries that fall under the category of "love."
Yeah, they're total crap.
Perhaps that's a bit harsh. Some of them have it right (mainly things about friends and family). A couple of the ones about relationships probably have it half right, but Jesus H. Jones.
I had no idea.
There's a line from a Florence + The Machine song that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
And all my stumbling phrases never amounted to anything worth this feeling.
I mean, we've all felt this way, right? It's the (almost) universal human experience, and something we know idiomatically if not intuitively. "Love at first sight." "We just knew." "Opposites attract." "Chemistry." "Love is blind." "Lieben uber alles." "Love is the neutrino that doesn't interface with the Higgs Field of Logic."
What, you've never used that last one?
But regardless of all the idioms, all the friends in happy, successful relationships, it still feels unique, doesn't it? Like ohmygodnooneinthewholecourseofhumaneventshaseverfeltthisway. So we listen to sappy pop songs on repeat. We tell our friends how we received a tablet in the parking lot at the Wedge and it was a big thing not because of the gift, but because it was a gift based on something we mentioned in passing like three weeks ago and wasn't it sweet that they remembered? We smile thinking about one another during the course of the day and spend long Saturday mornings cuddling and talking about video games and anime and our families and the books we're reading.
We talk. We talk a lot.
And those things and the way we talk about them are great. They're better than great, they're amazing. But the stuff that gets to me, what makes me think "I love you" is subtler, somehow. It's the look of understanding on his face when I say "I have obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety and some shit left over from exes that weren't very good to me." It's the way he smells, the messages when I'm stressed or upset, the way his voice sounds when we're up late talking that just . . .
Well, all my stumbling phrases, right?
