The Infinite Nature of These Three Words

Please never think “I love you” is only three words.

I love you like apple pie with vanilla bean ice cream. It’s warm and friendly. It’s sweet and nurturing and reminds me of simple times. I love you like thick black ink on creamy white paper and freshly sharpened pencils with big pink erasers on the end. They’re inspirational and they are the only way of organizing all the thoughts banging around in my head. It’s calming and it makes me feel complete.

Loving you is like finding a super rare pokemon in a random field of grass. It’s delightfully surprising. It’s exciting and spontaneous. It’s wonderful.

I love you like new video games on Christmas. The fresh smell of plastic, and plenty of time to play them, makes it feel like the real world will never kick back in.

I love you like new socks. Like the one pair of underwear I always put on as soon as they they come out of the dryer. They fit me perfectly and they make me feel beautiful and I’m always happy to see them again. I love you like sun-dried laundry, and sometimes while the comforter is still warm I lay it out on the grass and fall asleep listening to the birds chirp.

I love you like the sunshine and the smell of fresh mowed grass and sprinkler water. It’s promising.

I love you like home-grown herbs and like a butterfly hatching in an old peanut butter jar. Simple.

I love you like my favorite sweatpants, and like my favorite party dress. Comfortable, familiar, something I want against my skin.

You make me feel like it’s Friday night, and the song I can’t get out of my head is on the radio. The air smells like campfire and the moon is so full we don’t need our headlights. You make me shimmer and pop like stars and sparklers and I can’t contain it. Everyone knows, and for the first time ever that’s okay. I want them to stare. I am a firework. You are my flame.

I love you like perfectly browned marshmallows that taste like smoke. Have you ever cooked vegetables in tin foil directly on the charcoal? That’s what you taste like.

You are a spontaneous roadtrip. You are the music in a movie trailer that makes me feel like I’ve never seen anything worth my time, and I’ll never see anything that good again. Like my whole life has been leading up to this moment in this theatre, and it won’t be complete until I finally understand. You make me feel like I finally understand. You make me feel the way I do when a new friend casually quotes the movie I watch every time I’m sick. I know it’s the beginning of something great.

I love you like a dogeared copy of the book that taught me the world is huge and I’m an irreplaceable part of it. I love you like finding hidden family treasure in the basement, the kind that gives you a mystery to solve and teaches you something you never knew about you history. It’s like getting to be Indiana Jones.

I love you like accidentally meeting a childhood hero, finding out they’re awesome, getting free tickets to Comic-Con and winning more than you spent on a scratch off lottery ticket. All in one day.

I love you like a rainy Saturday, when the power’s gone out and all you have for company is a worn-out quilt and a greying deck of cards. I love you like every rainy day, and every Saturday, and every day I wish would never end.

I love you like a day at Disney World.

I love you like a tank full of gas.

I love you like Birthday money.

I love you like the soft way a baby smells and the tiny way a kitten meows and how sometimes even though they’re the smallest, they create the biggest swell of warm feelings and that strange instinct to simultaneously hug them gently and squeeze them until they pop. I want to scream about how I feel from a satellite so the whole Earth hears me at once—even the penguins and the polar bears and the deepest of sea animals. But then I want to erase their memories after so I can keep it all to myself again.

I love you like the CD I’ve been listening to on a loop for decades. I love you like my first cassette tape. I love you like the opening curtain on my first Broadway show. I love you in ways I don’t even know yet, and ways I will remember forever, and ways I’ve already forgotten.

Please never think “I love you” is only three words.