Form

Thirty consecutive days of writing you love letters has changed me forever.

Love Letter Day 30.

Here we are at the end of a month I promised would be spent writing nothing but love letters, and though the form of the letter has been challenged by my methods of wording—videos, allegories, love songs, internal dialogues—they have all been meant to be consumed by you. If I knew you were reading them, I would have known that they meant anything at all. View counts on my dashboard are all I have to confirm receipt. Those numbers have been quite small for how much energy I put into this epistolary, but this isn’t a passive aggressive complaint, I promise. Just an observation of energy. I confess to pretending/fantasizing/praying you are among the number. It hits me, the number is by definition, you.

Love has released me from a suffering I did not know I endured. I no longer struggle with the form or the format of my feelings, just as we let go of trying to understand the rate of passage of time. What is time, anyway? I no longer struggle with the idea of feedback and frequency. I can stand to keep feeding you love, and can stand to wait for an answer. The noise we’ve made envelops my entire body. A bell in my heart. I no longer struggle with words. I no longer struggle with music.

The struggle was never in finding the words, but in uttering them. So I stopped talking. And in the silence, we made up definitions to words we were not sure meant what we thought. We are an anagram. We are a wave. We are an eyelid. Things that constantly change state depending on how and where, but never questioning why or what, who. Never doubt it’s you I’m talking to. We witnessed each other. I am in your number and you are mine. Hurrah, us!

So here’s to changing what it means to love. I am a person who cannot stop feeling, will not stop spelling, floating, hoping. You are a channel, a throat, a bridge. When I say I love you, I mean that you are the means by which I conduct air. Whatever the format, love. Wherever we meet, love. Whenever I think of you, love. Whoever we are meant to be, love.

Beautiful red flag (from Salute, by Laurie Anderson 2021)

Post-Script: Writing in this way has transformed me, and I want to explore how much more deeply I can transform, and so I will keep writing love letters, if maybe not exactly at a daily clip. The greatest transformation of love is to have found my voice inside my body. Please, everybody, find love inside your body, and I will find you.