Variations in the Key of Claire
<<2003-10-02 - 9:51 p.m.>>

Truth is, I don't know why I find the people I do. I don't know why I found anyone. Chloe or Nikki or anyone. I am not exactly sure why it is that I love some people and not other people.

Some of it is me: when I am with the people I love best, I feel happier than I do when I'm not. I feel realer. More content with myself. Some of this is reflexive: if you can love me, there must be something worth loving. Some of it is reassurance: I am not crazy for being the way I am, because you are like me in many of these ways, and I love you, and thus I do not now hate the things about myself that I sometimes do hate when you're not around. (Variation: I love you because you love me for the things I sometimes hate about myself.) But also it is the knowledge that there is someone who fits me just right, someone who makes me get myself right, someone who is themself just right, just the right kind of person.

I don't want to make it sound like it's all about me. I had a funk last spring that lasted a week and revolved around the fact that I thought you didn't like me as much as I liked you, which was an awful lot and has only increased. Sometimes I think liking someone is almost separate from loving them, that liking them is about them, and loving them is about something not quite them and not quite you. (I'm not sure. While I love a lot of people, I've never been In Love, and I think that might be a crucial building block in developing this theory.) But that is not quite what I am wanting to say. What I am wanting to say is an extremely partial list of some of the amazing things about you: the sounds you make (and the faces), the fact that you don't lower your voice when you sing, the way you make silence multifaceted, the way you love sensations and particularly aesthetic memories, the fact that you can say "hippopotamus" in Swedish, the incredible vividness of you (the there-ness), your grace, your directness.

Cooking asparagus at one a.m., poetry readings in Russian. That there's always more to know.

That you ask touchy questions and have somehow convinced me to answer them honestly. How did you convince me to do that? (It's not just this once.) Why have I decided I want to tell you all these things I don't like to tell people?

When I moved in I didn't think we'd be friends. I thought you were beyond the beyond of cool, pretty much, and that you'd always think I was disorganized and irritating and much too earnest and more than a little bit pathetic. Sometimes it still amazes me that you don't.

(You kind of blew me away today, you know, with the standing on the couch and all.)

When we are old and collecting social security and talking to our house rabbits and traveling to Egypt and India, we will probably want to talk about today, with the standing on the couch and all, and I want to be sure it's not just me who got something to remember.

(By the way: I love you.)

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