Daily Dose: Love in retrospect

Dear eighteen-year-old Kacper,

I hear you are in love, and know that this is just about the best feeling a person can be in. It’s your first, and it’s beautiful because she is.

Before her, you used to wonder what love was exactly. You didn’t have much of a definition when you first found yourself in her arms and she in yours, but you promised to at least to give her romantic poems and corny jokes until the morning came.

You waited six months to say you loved her and when you tried that first time, it came out choppy, roundabout, and borderline skeptical as though you were questioning yourself even then. You first started talking about the weather. Then the movie. Then you kissed her to stop blathering altogether, hoping that your lips smacking against one another was enough sound and fury for the time being.

At the time, she laid on top of you and you wondered if maybe Adam and Eve was a true story because you fit together so nicely, then you exhaled and she did too and you couldn’t tell if was your breath or hers that you were inhaling.

Then you said it. The words came and went suddenly and it was your three-worded masterpiece. It was all you needed to say, all you never could until right then, right there, no sooner, no later.

It was love.

Though the first utterance was guttural and nearly incoherent, I am writing to years after that very moment you sat on that couch with her, and I want you to know that love hasn’t changed much since that moment when you first gave it existence by finding the words for it. As far as I can tell, the best definition isn’t any different than a stuttering young eighteen year old can figure out.

For love is farting around a girl and then farting around with her after the smell abates. Sometimes she farts too, and that’s when you know it’s real. Because no matter what you produce or sounds you excrete, love is just hot gas that can eventually grow cold without the right fuel.

Everything you have done after that first invocation, Kacper, from these words to this letter to your entire existence, has been about creating this fuel for yourself and others. You want all to feel the luxury of love. But know that this feeling, overwhelming as it is now, will end. One day before you can notice it or find your voice or stop your hands from shaking, things will pass, they will change, and when it’s all over, all that is left in the aftermath is what you made of it.

So don’t rush to find the finish line, Kacper. Instead, cherish her. Laugh with her, talk with her, love her anyways.

I want you to grab her hand right at this moment, and I want you to feel it with all the sensation you can muster. Course your fingers along her palm learning the contours of her skin, then maze your way to her knuckles and feel if they have any callous and then move slowly towards her cuticles, soaking in all the tiny hairs grazing across her fingers, and stop there, at the beginning of her nail where there are small, red scars from her incessant picking and try to press your fingerprints into the wax of her skin so as to make sure she won’t forget you and you won’t forget her either. Then when you’re satisfied, when there’s a print of your uniqueness on her, do it all again. Do it until you have her memorized or until she says, “Kacper, we’ve spent all day in bed, don’t you think we should do something other than play with my hands?”

And if she doesn’t say that, then I want you to do whatever you want – fully, entirely, with the sum of everything you can give – because it is only you who knows what that is. For now, it’s her. It won’t always be, but it is now and don’t you damn well forget it. Don’t think about anything else except this moment, this second – the very limited centimetre of her life that she has given you and you have given her. Together, you have almost made an inch and that means something.

What? Only you will know, and maybe you already have figured it out. I mean look at how much you’re smiling. Look at how much she is.

Yet that smile will fade and the two of you will fade with it. During those times, I want you to persevere if not for yourself, then for her, and if that’s not enough, then for the both of you. That way, when you see her again, and when you see how different the two of you have become and yet how similar she has remained with those hands and those fingers and those cuticles – those scratchy-scratched cuticles – you’ll have stories to tell that are shown in your laughter and the tapping of your feet.

You’ll talk about life, and love, and how silly the two of you were back then, and there won’t be an awkward silence between the two of you. Talk. Talk. Talk. It’ll be a time-machine of words, and each one, hesitantly weighed and anxiously delivered, will be a ghost of love, a ghost of the two of you.
When it ends and the conversation wilts away, she’ll leave and the words will be all that remain. You’ll be left with your own and she with hers and the two of you will see if they still meant what they used to.

So, make sure that they will when that ending comes. Stay trusting with her because it’s better than anxiety, stay happy with her because it’s more fulfilling than sadness, and stay so hopefully in love with her because one day you won’t be. You deserve it, and she all the more.

Until we meet, warm regards - Kacper