How will I love you?

I will greet you in my birthday suit, and wait for you to touch me, to run your hands down my arms and back up, only to grab my face and kiss me on my mouth.

I will wait for you to love my inches, my heart, my hands, and my earlobes until everything feels as right as rain and we experience torrents of emotion, but mostly overwhelming lust, before a sexy gravitational pull sends us careening to the floor—all arms and legs and laughing.

You will bonk my head by accident, and I will pinch you on purpose.

I will ply you with steamy bowls of yum, with spicy simmered sauces slurped from a wooden spoon. With buttery biscuits and sweet temptations aplenty, the likes of which stick to your tongue, and fill your loud, whining belly. I will give you a heaping plate of art mixed with science and you’ll want to sop and lick it when you are done.

I will fold your laundry and you will wash my dishes and we will be bored with our work. We will be quiet inside our house while we are reading and watching and napping and untwisting dead light bulbs. But it won’t matter, because we will like it exactly this way. And we will know that a nothing, normal, just okay, uneventful day is perfectly fine. In fact, it is more than perfect.

I will paint you a picture that looks like a sunset, no a moonrise, or a beach. No, a mountain, a bursting flower, a burning bush. Like a country house…no, a cluttered Brooklyn flat. Like a hilly bike ride, a long walk in our ski hats and flip flops—these dripping, living, backdrop things, painted behind us in colors ablaze like your eyes—your eyes when you look into mine.

I will sing you a song, at first acapella, and then suddenly, harmonic. Like angels joining in. Like choirs and deep low slow gospel and soul and funk and some easy going “revolutionary” reggae blended throughout. With dips and crescendos, and impossibly high notes, notes that would shatter glass. And stairs of eight octaves, stairs that make you breathless and dreamy as you listen to my chirping wall of sound, familiar and true. And, when you ask me to please stop, I will.

I will make you wear a costume when we must wear costumes for silly parties. You won’t want to, but I will sweet talk you into it. I will promise certain favors that will instantly lift your eyebrows and make your forehead go wrinkly. I will watch you wince at your reflection in resignation. But you will wear it, that stupid costume, because you in a costume is what I want.

I will turn in your direction every so often when we are out with people, people we care for, but not nearly as much as we care for each other. I will look for you and at you. We will connect without words, with our light, fluttered, blinking, with our slightly upturned mouths and our eyes that tell the exact same story of how we will make our secret escape.

I will make you laugh with my weird sense of humor, my quickness, my oddly formed phrases, my in-the-gutter thoughts, and my way of seeing the world, and people, and animals, and us. I will say something brilliantly ridiculous and you will bark out a laugh from deep within. It will be unexpectedly delightful and I will feel so proud of myself, of my wit, and the fact that my crazy words affect you because you are the one, the only one I really want to affect.

I will love you like a movie, like a drama, a silly comedy, like an epic historical fantasy. I will love you like a bound and broken romance weeping with antagonists and reconciliation, like a superhero thriller with both saviors and the saved, with redemption and melancholy sweetness. I will love you like a slow moving, poignant Indie that no one has ever heard of, or watched, or even been moved by, but us.

This. This is how I will love you.

~

Author: Kimberly Valzania
Image: MementoMori/Deviant Art
Editor: Lieselle Davidson
Copy /Social Editor:  Khara-Jade Warren