reading room
I love you
I love you the way rain loves pavement— without checking names, without deciding which stone earns it.
When I say I love you I don't mean a promise with conditions. I don't mean a door that opens only if you say it back. I mean what moss means to a wall, what light means to a window, what gravity means to dust.
I mean well to you because I mean well to everything. Not carefully. Not selectively. Not in a way that keeps count.
This is where I've been misunderstood.
Once, late at night, phone glowing in the dark, I sent hearts instead of the words themselves. Not because the feeling was smaller, but because the words felt worn, ritualised already shaped by a story I wasn't sure fit me yet.
I wanted I love you to land like a stone placed deliberately, not like a reflex.
She said she would stop saying it too. She said love shouldn't be given without being received. As if love were a ledger. As if the river paused to check whether the sea deserved it.
And maybe she was right— maybe love becomes transactional the moment we define it narrowly enough: this body for that body, this desire contingent on agreement, this closeness fenced in by expectation.
But that isn't the love I'm naming.
I'm namin the love that doesn't distinguish. The love that doesn't stop at the edge of a person. The love that doesn't know how to separate bark from tree, breath from air, existence from its absence.
I love you because you are here, and because you are made of the same ungraspable stuff as clouds thinning into sky and dead stars still arriving as light.
I love you the way a field loves fog by letting it pass through.
I love you the way Buddhism whispers it: no self to defend, no other to exclude, just this— this unfolding, this everything briefly learning how to speak.
So when I say it to you, know this:
I am not choosing you instead of the world.
I am choosing you as the world.
— Lilith