Letter to Nell
January 26, 2016
Nell,
I have some things I need to tell you.
We haven’t spoken in a while. You knew me at my weakest, when I was like a budding seed surrounded by the harshness of winter. Like a beam of sunlight, you inspired me to grow and blossom into something stronger. Although I can support myself by my own roots now, I continue to cherish what you mean to me.
And like the sunlight changes its intensity with the passing seasons, I know you, too, must change. We are dynamic human beings, and must never stagnate. You may grow… a little or a lot. But no matter who you are now or who you will become, my adoration for you will forever remain a constant, because your core essence will always be one of happiness, beauty, and goodness.
I still don’t know if what I feel for you is love, because I’ve only ever felt this way about you. Like a drug, you open me up to being filled to the brim with joy, yet at the same time I’m vulnerable to the lowest of lows. But whereas a drug degenerates a life over time, you lift me higher and higher. And when I look at you in my mind’s eye, you look back with a deliberate, knowing gaze, as if daring me to live. I feel alive.
I’ve chased that feeling, trying to find or recreate something similar. Nothing comes close. Is it love? Only by the most generous stretch of the word.
I could tell you that my love for you is greater than the number of grains of sand in the vast deserts of the Middle East.
I could tell you that my love for you is like the feeling you get when you gaze at the stars shining majestically above you at night and you realize you are a finite entity floating in an infinite sea of space and time. You meld into the peaceful waves of the universe and you feel serene and secure.
I could tell you that I will love you until we die. But that would be a lie. It goes beyond even death.
I could promise that I’ll keep my love for you endlessly and that I will never forsake it. But a promise implies there’s a challenge to keep it. I couldn’t break a promise to love you forever even if I wanted to because it’s something that’s intertwined with my very soul.
The word love in all its permutations can’t even begin to describe what I feel for you. It’s something else that transcends definition or societal constraints. You are everything to me.
As I think of your voice, your expression, and simply your poetic existence, I close my eyes and realize a limitless well of bliss in me as I smile from a place of eternal warmth and contentedness.
I smile a smile so genuine that I’m reminded of my own humanity and that all is as it should be in the world. I feel happy just to be.
If what I feel for you is what people call love, then I may never find love again. No healthy relationship would encourage such unbridled idealism.
It could be an obsession, a compulsion, or a fixation. I’ve tried to forget you. Believe me, for every positive emotion you’ve given me, there’s an equal darkness that has nearly killed me. Like a helpless, confused child, I’d feel the anger sprouting from my frustration and lack of control… the fact that my every desperate, conscious moment was consumed by thoughts of you.
I used to wonder why I could never shed your image from my psyche. Now I see the truth. I choose to keep you in my heart. On any given day I have the power to let you go. But it won’t be today. And it won’t be tomorrow either, because you make me a stronger person every single fucking day.
It must be wrong to be affected by someone so much. You aren’t affected by me, yet I am affected only by you. It’s always been that way. If I knew you at another time in my life, maybe I could have done things differently. Maybe I could have focused on fostering a friendship. Maybe I could have tried for something more. You’re the one person I would risk my entire life for. And that’s exactly why I’m going to keep living and bettering myself… so that my life will become something that would even be worth risking.
But I wasn’t ready to take that risk. I’m still not ready. If comfort and complacency are the antithesis of actually living life, then you represent to me the endless struggle towards progress. You are an ideal that I strive towards daily. In that sense I will never be ready because I’ll always have that drive to be a greater man than I was yesterday.
In another way though, I have always been ready. I feel a homely familiarity with you. You’re perfect to me. And I am already enough. I am more than enough. I used to love you more than I loved myself. It was a dissonance I fought for years. Yet if one day our cosmic wavelengths align, and you and I are allowed by fate to interact once again, we will meet as equals. When that time comes, I hope I’ll be able to impact your life in some positive way as you have mine for the last decade.
I adore you, Nell.
-Seth