Birth (to Kaila)

For my greatest friend, my most immeasurable love in this life, who has now moved through the sunset into the night:

I don't know much about family, not the way others seem to. Some sense of stability, maybe representation of a home. Comfort, familiarity, identity. My family never offered me those things; they still don't and likely never will. They showed me what love was not, over and over and over again, until I understood the absence of love. This was hard, maybe the hardest. It showed itself as pain and sorrow and suffering to inhale or exhale or anything in between. I barely survived it. Each little tear, chip and strike left more and more space inside me; hollow, empty, alone and depressive.

But, do you see? It created space inside me, more than I knew what to do with alone. So I searched... and then, I met you. You had space too. Differently than me, but endless space and urgent desire to learn. So, you gave me your patience and I gave you my urgency. You gave me your avoidance and I gave you my perpetual arrival. And we gave each other our space, the space in which we poured the affirmative of all we'd learned in love's deficit, the space to practice love without regret or judgment. The space to try and try and try, to plant love in the void and grow it.

I'm proud of us, darling. We have never fell into any traps most people in love do. We never take each other for granted, we never hesitate to express appreciation and love, and we maintain the endless space for it all to find a home.

Exploration of ourselves and each other is synonymous, and so boredom withers to nonexistent between us. To this day, you surprise and astonish me. Your existence is the root of my wonder with the world - how you could possibly exist as you do, and how unbelievably all else seems to fail in comparison.

The living, breathing organism that is our marriage is a white oak with the strength and wisdom of 600 years. How lucky for us, we didn't fuck it up. We let it grow as it needed, and for it we have learned the depths and lengths and measures of love are truly endless, and ever unfolding.

I'd know nothing of love were it not for you. Any kindness, consideration, patience and devotion in me are all yours. People don't know it, they don't see it, but when I offer them even the most remote sense of love, it is grown of you. Because we allow our love to grow as it needs, I am able to offer its fruits to others.

My darling, do you hear me? Do you understand? This is the epitome of love.

I know what your heart aches for, and my incompetence in comparison. But, if I may offer you some peace in this life, know you have given and received the very thing that people ache for, fight and die for in this world; settling for its impostors, numbing its absence in sensation, yet so often never tasting it.

Fear not, sweet darling, most precious jewel of my world. You have loved and been loved in the purest possible way. You have given that very essence in you, the one that aches for birth, and have planted its seed in me, that it may grow and reach people in your name, unto eternity.

True love, true love, true love and its rebirth are ours.

Come what may.