I’m twenty, and I haven’t said I love you in years.
Sometimes, I doubt I would even recognise the words if they were to pass my lips, past the fences of my teeth and the trenches under my tongue.
I have written them, thought, and felt them. I have poured them in cups of coffee like an artist would their soul into their work. I have scribbled them in the margins of school notes when my friends weren’t looking, so I could shape them like lazy doodles, and so they could reciprocate with a fond glare. I have baked them on birthdays and burnt them on Sundays, lit them up for Christmas and roared them at karaoke.
I’ve smiled them into pictures to put on my nightstand: I love you when I read, I love you when I dream, I love you when I can’t sleep.
I love you when I dust, and my gaze falls upon the frame like it’s the first time it’s seeing it. Cleaning always felt nostalgic to me – not for the throwing away as much as for the nurturing of what was and still is.
Here’s a receipt I got from our stop at a gas station in 2014. You’d gotten terrible coffee and I made fun of you for it, so you’d thrown the crumpled paper at me. I’ve never told you, but I kept it in my pocket like a heart and put it away in the drawer as if it were a bin. I’ll never make any use of it, and I won’t ever remember it – but I think that’s exactly why we clean: so we can look back at everything we don’t need, choose to keep the least useful things, and have it mean so much we don’t dare put it in speech.
Once, I put down the broom and sank to the floor with exhaustion. It was still dirty, and I’d barely done anything but sweep around the nightstand. Crumbs of sleeplessness still hid in the shadow on its left, in the rift between it and the bed, right where I always dropped my rest. As I sat there, my eyes slipped back to the pictures and the disbowelled chest, and I thought: what a grave temple, what a grave. My memories lie forgotten like the dead, my duster their flowers.
At the time, the idea felt grim to me, and I almost shamed it away, guilty. But I’m twenty, and I love so ardently, I might die for it. Too old to burn with anger, too young to have completely given up. Emotions twist under my skin like worms in too alive a soil: decaying wild, suffocating life. Nothing breathes under here, but rot has made the trees mad with verdancy. And just like this oxymoron of a forest, I pray my love to death and frame it above the casket of its rests, a poem in lieu of eulogy.
Some days, it feels like everything I do means I love you. Waking up to make breakfast, staying up late to wait, not killing myself. And sometimes, I want to cry with loneliness because it seems like no one ever says it back.
We’ve turned twenty, and no one has said I love you in years.
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