I don’t think you know how much I care for you.
Let me tell you what I think of you. I’ve never told you how, every morning, when I see your name written down – some place I never thought I’d see it, or someplace where I look everyday, hoping to see it there – it makes my heart thud and my blood pound within my flesh. I’ve never told you how beautiful you look in the light of the sun, or the moon, or any time that light has ever touched your face. I’ve never told you the way you make me more human, more alive, more real, than this weak, pitiful, pathetic person that I fear myself to be in my darkest moments. You make words come to me; you grant me rhythm and sounds and melody, dreams and thoughts and an imagination that runs wild within your presence, vivid in your viscinity. I’ve never told you just how much I believe you mean to me, just how much I would mind if you were hurt or injured or bruised and bleeding bloody within your soul. Every day I wake up thinking about you, wondering where you are and what you’re doing, and every day I go to sleep dreaming about you, wondering if you think the same of me.
You don’t know me, but perhaps you do. I do not hide, lurking in the shadows, creeping in the dark, a Quasimodo waiting for Esmeralda to look at him. I am there – right beside you, right with you – every single moment of every minute of every hour of my life. You call me a friend; I do not know what to call you. An angel, perhaps, or a goddess, because no matter how much you believe you are not beautiful, you will always be that way to me. Always.
So why do you hide? What is it about me that draws you away, that keeps you distant, hesitant and distrustful? When I talk to you, why do you cease to be as alive as I know you are, as free and unwavering as you have always been? What is it that makes you tread cautiously around me, wind carefully around me, though you never act that way around anyone else I have ever known? What demon keeps your soul chained, what monster your spirit leashed? Tell me, because I want to know.
You tell me, I know, of your day and your deeds, of joy and hidden disbelief, of everything you have seen with eyes that are now watching me carefully, as if at any moment I will take a knife and stab it in your heart, though you do not know me if you think I am capable of such treachery. We will talk – oh, yes, we will talk – well into the night, well into the day, hours and hours long and years and years’ worth of words, but always it is the same thing, the tested things, the tired things. Perhaps I will never be a better friend than I am now, perhaps I will never be as close to you as I wish – these are the thoughts that send me dizzily into a darkness to extreme to describe, to a hell whose fury words cannot illustrate, to a beast whose savagery only gods can comprehend. Don’t you know – can’t you see – that I would give anything – anything – to be something other than what I fear you think of me?
So, tell me, I will ask you - because that is the way things are done, the way conversations are held between you and me - so tell me what you think, what you believe, what you feel? What are you like? What person hides beneath that mask that humans wear, what spirit shines so fiercely in your heart that you must cover it so ordinary men will not be blinded?
But you shy away; you will not answer me directly. You will move to thoughts and topics distant and scant related, and then suddenly I find myself tumbling through words I do not wish to say, phrases I did not mean to utter, not because they are nice and honest and true, but because they have no meaning when placed before what your words can do to me. I want to hear what you feel, not what you think, not opinions about books and art and films, about things that matter so little to you: common, ordinary things, everyday things that humans cannot live without and yet cannot be alive with. For you, I would kill Gandhi himself, murder Mandela in his sleep, even crucify the world upon the cross to which it is chained – so how come you will not let me see who you truly are?
Sometimes you let me in – just once, maybe twice, and now I wait for a third. Sometimes you reveal to me the thing that keeps your heartbeats fresh, the things that muddy the oceans of your beauty, the tiny hurts and the trivial scars that haunt your wounded spirit, because no human being survives life unscathed. You will tell me things I would like to believe you would not dare to tell another soul, beliefs and axioms and theories and dreams I hope one day to match, bit by bit and inch by mile. If there is a door inside you that you keep locked, it is always the key I wish to find, because I do not want to see the windows or the walls of your pretty form. I have no time, no space for the decorations that mark you – though I will always have years kept aside for you, millions of hundreds of empty worlds marked separately just for you - so why do you torment me with them? What is this wall that divides us, that stands higher than mountains, stronger than brick, tougher than love?
You will never be mine. I know this, I think, and I have always known it. You and I are too fundamentally apart, too essentially dissimilar to ever really be halves of a whole; we are polar opposites, you and I, ice cold and yet red hot with each other, entities that fate has chosen to keep together, as joke and petty amusement, and for no greater purpose than whim. And yet I know that all I really want – all I shall ever really crave, all I shall ever really desire – is the person that you are, never mind if it loves me or not. Tell me the reason you will open your eyes every day to greet the sun; the small things that grab your heart and whisk it gently into the night. Tell me what you love most of all, what you loathe and detest above everything you see. Your heart is a gentle one, your mind a beautiful thing – tell me what makes them so, what artist and god chose to glorify himself in making you what you are. Tell me a hundred things, a dozen things, a million things and a billion things, because I shall never tire of your voice and that laughter you possess.
If you cannot give me the key to your soul, then open the door. Just once. Just one more time. Because I promise I shall make you feel like the goddess you truly are, like the nymph that haunts the fields of Eden, the gardens of Olympus; because I promise that one day I shall make you want to share every tear you shed with me, every haphazard kiss and broken heart with me. Let me be the friend who knows you for what you are, who can read every piece and every detail of your loving form. Let me be your diary, if you are Anne Frank; let me be your mirror, if you are Narcissus, your confidant, your trustee. Do not care if you burden me with your sorrows, your hurts, or weigh me down with your tiny delights, your small pleasures; I love them all, and I shall not part with them for all the world. Do not tell me things you could so easily tell another, things that matter too little to ever be of any worth; they are not you, they will never be you, and you are all that matter to me.
Tell me who you really are, not the superficial being you pretend to be.
Is that too much to ask?