People say many things about love.

They say it’s hard work, they say it’s easy. They say it comes when you least expect it. They say you must be open to it for it to arrive on your doorstep. They say you can’t fully love someone until you learn to love yourself. They say it means loving someone even more than you love yourself. They say opposites attract, they say it’s important to share common characteristics. They say it’s real when you can finish someone’s sentences. They say it means something special when it challenges you to see the world differently.

They say it’s the most complicated, inexplicable, insane, and intoxicating notion ever known to man. They say it’s overrated. They also say it’s the only thing that ever really matters.

This month is Justin and mine’s 6^th anniversary. I honestly can’t wrap my head around the fact that the time has passed so quickly. It all seems like it happened in a flash. We were 18 and 19, (skinny), clueless, vulnerable, restless, naive and completely enamored by each other. It hasn’t always been easy. It hasn’t always been hard. Over the years we went from two clueless underclassman college kids to roommates, to partners-in-crime traveling and exploring new places, to two kids in their mid-twenties searching for themselves and for what it means to be two separate healthy, independent, successful people bonded together by this thing we call love. We have grown up together- we are still growing up together, and I couldn’t have pictured the past six years any other way, with any other person, anywhere else in this crazy world.

Raymond Carver wrote the following:

“It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.”

Even though I’m trying to explain it in some small way here, I think he is touching on an important part of the truth- that there isn’t any way to describe love except to say that it is a combination of all of the above mentioned ironies from the beginning of this post, yet also none of them at all, wrapped up in one messy but beautiful package.

To Justin: There is really no way to describe how you make me feel. I love you in your crazy moments, I love you when you are quiet and sweet and vulnerable. I love you when all you have to say is a word like “Pepper” and we both fall into uncontrollable laughter. I loved living in a box with you in New York City, and I love loving you even when I’m a million miles away around the globe. Love is far too complicated for me to pretend like I can explain it fully. Even though there aren’t enough words in all of the languages of the world put together to adequately describe it, I know you mean more to me than you will probably ever understand. I know that I love you. I know that saying it is ‘hard’ to be apart doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, but it is. I hope that in the end we can look back and say that we learned from all this, and grew stronger because of it. I miss you everyday, and I will continue to do so until I’m back home with you this summer.

Happy anniversary, and cheers to everything we have shared together, and also to everything we can look forward to for the future.

BISOUS! XOXO

je t’aime toujours.

❤