Trusting Words

Sometimes I love you is no longer enough.

You want to say more. Those tiny words, repeated at the end of phone conversations and in morning partings before work, begin to feel pedestrian, limp. "I love you." A phrase you could barely wait to use when you met, the only approximation you could come up with to describe the pounding in your chest you felt when you rounded the corner and pulled up to his house. A phrase that was so genuine and heartfelt that you passed it over, as if carefully wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a bow. Precious and rare. It articulated your heart beats and anticipation of simply being near him. It invited more, it allowed for 'just the same.' Accepting and caring, accurate and adequate.

But now the house is your house, too. And pulling around the corner is coming home, rather than coming over. And as weeks turned into months, and months to years, the unfamiliar became close and the new became reliable. And somewhere in between, there was a day when the words failed. There was too much more to say. Those same tiny words no longer conveyed how large your heart had grown, nor how your feelings had evolved. They were inadequate to describe what you felt when you watched him sleep, when you touched his cool head on the pillow and whispered goodnight. It bore no witness to how you trust his decisions, his judgments, his thoughts. These three words could barely contain a hint of the future you see in his eyes and how you warm inside when he laughs out loud.

And what do you do then? Do you find more words? Do you search your vocabulary for other ways to put it together and offer it up? What words would work -- are they many or are they few? Complicated and full of meaning, or simple and short?

Or do you trust? Trust that he sees it in your eyes, when you smile back from the casual glance across the table at a crowded dinner. Trust that he already knew, by the way you touch his head right before he falls asleep at night and walk arm and arm with him at the mall. Your needless calls just to hear his voice or the way you settle down around him, happily. Do you trust that he knows just how important he is from the simple gesture, when mere words begin to fail?

The words 'I love you' no longer reach the edges of what I feel for you, M. I hope that you know how very, very important you are to me. And while I cannot seem to find the words, I promise you a lifetime of little gestures to express my heart.

Happy birthday, beebie.

.j.