Hello Lover,

{This photo is by Rainbeaux on flickr.}

I remember being a teenager, remember wondering what you would look like. What would be your very first words to me? Would they be epic? Would they be words that poets would envy or merely "nice day outside, isn't it?" I remember being full of hope and wonder. Hope and an unbroken, untainted heart are so powerful, no? It’s full of magical mystery that as time passes and one grows older, wiser as some might say, that magical mystery seems to turn into fog and slowly dissipates until it’s no longer something you can tangibly hold onto. It’s sad how an innocent heart can turn bitter and harden. It's a crime and I sometimes wish that life had its own law. The law of not just the physical self but of the emotional one as well. That those who hurt you emotionally can be sentenced to their appropriate crime and locked away so they can never hurt another. Emilie Autumn wrote lyrics that since reading, follows me around like a ghost:

"My life was ended by your hand
The kind of murder where nobody dies
But I don't suppose you'd understand"

So I come to you broken, and injured. I come to you with baggage that I carry over my shoulders. It burdens me and makes my breaths short and rapid. I asked you when we first met to hold me gently, so as not to further break me. But now that I know what your face looks like, now that I know that as much as I wished your first words to me be epic, you are neither the man I pictured or the poet I'd hoped you to be, you are MORE. You are the person who fits in all my little nooks and groves. You are perfect, to me. Your face is the face I picture when I close my eyes, your words gently caress my soul in a way no poet could ever hope to caress, and your touch is the one I long for at night. I am ever grateful that life didn't give me what I asked for, because the truth is, life gave me much more than I even knew I wanted. So my love, don't worry about my precarious emotional state. I no longer wish you to "fix me", only I can do that. And I will. It's going to take some time, a little elbow grease, and a few missteps but I will make myself whole again. And I know that I can do that now because your presence offers me the strength I needed to make this a possibility. Your love is what I needed all along to be the happy, carefree girl I once was.

So thank you for being nothing like I imagined and for being everything I've ever needed in my life.

Our start might not have been epic, but our journey together will be.

Yours with love and hope,