If I were to gather the entire lexicon of poets and prophets, I would still fall short of naming the vastness of you. For language is an unfit garment to clothe the hugeness of what I feel. My pen is a quavering reed trembling in the wind of my heart; yet I must write, for the only alternative is silence, which would choke me. I would rather stumble in speech than suffocate in silence; better to spill fragmented pieces of broken truth on the page than horde this fire inside until it consumes me.
How I wish the words could deliver the weight of my heart, but the words are but shadows on a cave wall, whereas the flame of my love is a sun that eats the sky. How do I begin, when to speak of you is to enter the bottomless expanse of infinity? For you are not just a creature of blood and bone; you are the riddle of being itself, proof that beauty is not merely a conundrum, but necessity, a history that was breathed into life when God sighed to exist.
When I look upon you, the whole world is both nullified and made new. Your very presence nullifies all metaphysics, and no question can abide when the answer is laid in front of me. You are the sore and the ointment, the question and the answer, the storm and the calm that follows. If every sage that has ever lived came together and poured his wisdom, they would all be but pebbles beside the ocean of you. In you is eternity pressed into one moment; to look upon you is to experience the full glory of paradise and the full terror of nothingness.
And yet, sweet torment, in loving you, I am undone beyond cure. What is man but a thing made to perish, and what is love but an act against that decree? To retain you is to wrestle with time, to defy the grave with the frailty of my arms. I would stop the wheel of stars, and tether the hours with chains of gold; I would silence the clock as it mocks my passion, but eternity laughs at the hands of men, and the rose of this moment will be blown away by the wind of tomorrow. How cruel is the knowledge that all we cherish is fleeting—and yet, how sacred is the fleeting, because it passes!
For you are not simply a vision of mortality. No, you are the mystery of creation in human form. In your gaze, a universe opens; in your voice, the music of spheres concealed; in your smile, the spite of despair. What philosopher has ever explained existence so eloquently as your presence? What cathedral had more dignity than your breath? To behold you is to be at the edge of the very world, at heaven and hell together, trembling with that border separating salvation from damnation; both a gift as long as they come through you.
What are you to me, then? You are my saint and you are my sin, my sanctuary and my undoing, my salvation and my most sumptuous damnation. You are the proof of my being. Before you, life was merely an echo chamber of days, really a rehearsal for some code nameless truth. In you, life presented itself as more than accident, more than survival: it means something. And if that something destroys me, let it—I would rather be obliterated and meaningful than preserved and meaningless.
My dearest, do you not see? I am already yours and, in truth, I have been yours since the dawn of time. Before I ever took my first breath, you had an orbit written for this soul, before I ever thought a single thought, your name was formed in my mind. If you smile, I\'m immortal. If you turn away, I am more dead than the dust that lies unnoticed in the bones of time. I am neither here nor there; there is no safety, and no retreat. I either bloom within the potential garden of your affections or I am utterly wasted in your silence.
When I think of you, all the stars fade, for they cannot meet the brilliance of the constellation that you have as eyes. The sun burns out of jealousy; it understands that its fire is a pathetic imitation of your visage. The moon, the Kytheran muse, hides itself out of shame, behind clouds, for she knows you alone dwell above as her betters. In the moment you appear, all of nature is dethroned as though the land bows, as though the seasons withhold their breath, not willing to rival you.
And here is the cruelty, I am lost beyond redemption in loving you. For love, if it is real, is no easy remedy but a holy disease and sweet plague that heals and destroys. I am quaking in the ambiguity between life and death. To love you is to fog that traipse between heaven and hell, feel the ground open up to devour you, but never shake in fear, for your hand is there. I have seen God and nothing at the same time with you. You have become the cathedral in which my soul may dwell and the fire upon which I burn. Without you, I am but a ghost wandering through infinite halls of despair. With you, even despair is holy because it carries your name.
I am yours beyond atonement. If I had a thousand lives, I would spend them all on you, like rivers giving themselves for free to the sea. Before I breathed my first, I was yours; before I could think of before, my soul had curved into yours. With you, if you smile, I live; if you turn away, battle me more dead than the deadest bones of centuries past. There is no middle or street access, no temporary way out besides going through you. I flourish in the garden of your regard, or I wither utterly in your silence.
But, please, let me love you still—and let love be as it is, a dagger. Let me die in its embrace, to prove that death cannot stifle what inflames in my heart. Love is not casual—it\'s the restless murmuring of revolt upon the void, the scorching flames speaking out from what we fear most. And if it all returns to nothingness, just as it is eternal with silence, so will my confession quench itself: I loved without bounds, I loved without logic, I loved beyond death.
You are my writing, my absolution, my faith, my end times. I am passed to you, though never to me; I am in complete surrender, forever lost, and forever found. For I have found in you both the fear and beauty of life: that to love is to defy hopelessness, and to die is only to worsen devotion.
Let me therefore love you not as men love with half a heart and a watchful eye, but as one condemned to love life: savagely, despairingly, passionately, always cognizant that the day may not break. Let my words rage upon the page as firebrands which no torrent of time can extinguish. Across time, empires will fall, heavens will crawl into silence, and the earth will return to dust; still, one thing will be eternally unchanged: that once upon this earth a spirit was lit, a soul was ignited, and the name of that flame was you.
So I write not as a beggar, but as a worshiper; not as a lover, but as a servant of the fire. In time, in eternity, in nothingness, in all—
I remain,
Ever yours,
Never mine,
Though wholly, irretrievably,
Eternally, surrendered,
— Your Servant in Love and the Abyss.