Love letters I never sent #9

I read a lot. I used to read a lot more, but not so much anymore. I read because I was searching for something. A word. A word that could describe the feelings I felt towards you.

I was so sure the feeling I felt was love. I loved you with all my heart, but the word 'love' didn't quite describe it. So I started reading. Certainly someone else must have felt the swell that I was feeling. They must have felt it and wrote it down. Or told an author about it in enough detail, that the writer said "Aha! I know the perfect word for that" and put pen to paper about it.

But I read. I read everything I could find. It became quickly obvious that romance novels were never about love. Not about any kind of real love anyways. The same went for all other fictional books. Although I suppose I should've known: why look for real emotion in fake literature?

So I moved on to biographies and other stories of fact. There, I found out about the quiet and reserved kind of love that older couples feel. The kind that doesn't shine brightly, but burns forever. I found out about the firework kind of love. Explosive and larger than life, but fizzles out shortly after (is that really love?). I found out about big and small love. I found out a lot about lost love. But none of it seemed right. None of it seemed exactly the same.

This is around the time I started to doubt myself. Maybe what I'm feeling isn't exactly love? Maybe it's something else altogether. But no, that can't be right. I moved on to poetry.

Most of it seemed to either follow the fake love or real love I had read before. The different varieties and quantities and shapes and colors. But never anything new. Some came close. In fact, in poetry, love is perhaps best expressed. The writer is not limited to sentence structure or themes or continuity. The English language can move like water in poetry, surging at points and trickling at others as necessary.

Yet still, nothing quite like I felt.

This is when I gave up on reading. What I feel for you, I am now convinced, no person has ever felt for another before. You might find that hard to believe. I did too for a long time. But it's true.

"I love you" has no place in it. There are all sorts of variants I could use. Adjectives I can append and pages upon pages I could write. But there is no combination of words that expresses exactly the breadth or depth to which I feel for you. There is not enough words in the dictionary to describe it.

The closest I can come to explaining, is how the sun must feel about light. It doesn't think anything of it: it is the status quo. It can't see anything else, or feel anything else. The sun must not even know what it is, that it is a star or what. The sun must think it, itself, is just light. Light and nothing else. Nothing else exists for it.

Similarly, for me, you are my existence. You are all there is in my existence. Nothing else exists for me but you.

Does that make sense at all? At any rate, that's why I don't read anymore.