Hey there. 

This is a thank you love note of sorts.

Anything I write to you will seem trite right now. I’ve been so tired today that most of my thoughts have been reserved for the act of walking to and from places, the act of being present and polite and going through motions. 

I’m writing because I feel incapable of stringing words together in pretty ways. I’m writing because it’s too early to sleep. I’m writing because I love you. I know that makes you nervous: love can’t be tossed around like that. Well, I say can it because it can.

I’ve never been able to say I can’t imagine a world without someone. I can. I can too easily indulge in projected realities and imagine my life as it would be were it to have been shifted by the slightest degree of chance in any direction other than the one that brought me to sitting in my room and typing this message.

It’s easy to imagine you not being here. It makes me breathe funny at first, but I can imagine it.

It’s also easy to imagine my life without cookies. It would be the same. The tragedy is in the sameness, in how little I can perceive of what is not so much missing but fillable. (My parents would always say, “Ojos que no ven, corazon que no siente,” as in, what the eyes can’t see the heart can’t feel —if I don’t know what’s missing, I can’t miss it.) A lot of things would make me happy in a cookie-less world. I would still have rainy days, naps, ice cream, and Pink Floyd. The value of a cookie, the value of anything, is in my unawareness of how much pleasure I could receive from it; something so casual and inconsequential as nibbling on some sugar-based goodness for the duration of a pop song is wonderful because it is so simple. I guess I’m saying we’re all different treats —told you I’d be trite.

I value you more than I value cookies and without you maybe I would laugh less but read more books. Maybe my head would tilt differently while I listen to a story or my hands would not move to the rhythm they do when I tell one; maybe I wouldn’t think about law enforcement or typography as much: these are your things. 

Different things would go where you go and neither you nor I would know how much could be built in the spaces between your thoughts and mine. 

There’s no way of knowing whether we’re better off or not. There’s no way of saying what good comes of our laughter or our discomfort, of you wearing my sweater or me wearing your pants. That’s what I love. I love that you and I are products of chance and pushed together in ways that easily pull apart or never reveal at all. I love that I choose you in full consciousness of the arbitrary chaos involved in my choice.

I love that we choose without knowing any better.