By Tabs
Kami,
I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you Jesus fuck I fucking love you! Not only do
I love you, but I do it with this frightening sort of totality; like the sincerest of solar eclipses,
laden with astronomical significance—certainly none of that seasonal, partial, crescent bullshit.
Nothing I feel for you is partial.
I love your nose and your arms and your teeth and your hands and when you wear that one
paper-thin ringer tee. I love when I give you a million kisses all across your face and your
giggles make me giving you a million more a moral obligation. I love when you flex the arm I’m
holding ever so slightly. I love the rib tattoo you crafted yourself and the lens through which you
see the world and the crinkle of your nose that comes immediately after you crack first in an
impromptu staring contest. I love the sound of your laugh and the slight furrow in your brow that
tells me when I have your full attention. I am so entirely charmed by you that even now, I have to
cling to my train of thought for dear life before I look at you, or I will almost certainly lose it.
I love the silly and important things we have in common, like how we both derived great
childhood meaning from the Owl Jolson episode of Looney Tunes and our shared penchant for
radical absurdism. I love that you’ve given me such a fondness for clowns, even after a
quarter-century of being absolutely terrorized by them. I love that I see us in everything, be it a
pair of gnarled cypress stumps by the pond at the Botanical Gardens or a supremely detailed
example of Donnie Darko fanart, hand-selected from the sacred archives of AO3. I love that we
have always been complementary flavors of odd, maybe in the same way that the woman at
Maggott’s Grocery described her most heavenly afternoon snack—like pickles & peppermint.
And though I do not love the somber and difficult things we have in common, like a convoluted
adolescence and a pathological need for particularity (I do not love that we have both agonized
for so long in this life, or how we both still cling to the unmet need of attempted understanding
from those who’ve known us far longer!) I do love, carefully, the unfortunate sharedness of being
fully realized by you, and you by me.
I think that sometimes I have trouble believing we are real—not in an idealized, limerent, deified,
placed-atop-a-pedestal sort of way, nor in a delusional, schizoaffective, visual-tactile
hallucination sort of way. You’re not without fault, and I know that you’re not impervious to
royally fucking up someday. And yet, it’s these hypothetical future disasters that I can’t help my
excitement for—because in these moments of catastrophe, be it a hellish symptom from the
necessary collapse of this end-stage imperialism, or a tick-infested feral graveyard puppy, now
impulsively confined and ruining your carpeted apartment, I am certain that everything about this
is as it seems. It is proof that we do not exist inside a carefully controlled petri dish; in a lidded
vacuum where we are indefinitely insulated from all tough things. It is a testament that even
under the most hostile circumstances, we persevere together. I mean this in the same way that I tune out Christians who’ve never had a crisis of faith—an unchallenged commitment rings
hollow. I want us to be chosen, forged; actively, deliberately, even and especially in times of trial.
It’s you, maybe it always was. I am endlessly relieved we met.
With my entirety,
Tabs
Tabs (she/any) is a mid-20s poet who’s back in her hometown of San Antonio, Texas, in the U.S.