Where do I start? Where Do You End?

Lovely love,

When you’re gone, I feel like I forget how to breathe. Dramatic, I know but sometimes it really does feel like I’m dying a little, and I suppose that’s the problem with loving something. You become aware of all the ways you could lose it.

I’m too paranoid for someone who loves this much. And then you’re here, and suddenly my heart is doing something ridiculous. It feels too big for my body, like all this love has nowhere to go except everywhere.

This playlist is what that feels like to me. That particular kind of happiness that almost hurts. Like your heart is so full it might actually burst.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

I made this playlist years ago, before I had you to give it to. I think my older sisters were getting married around that time, and I was collecting songs I imagined would be good for my own wedding someday. I was probably sitting there romanticizing a love I had never really known, trying to imagine what it would feel like to belong to someone in that way. Hahaha. The things we do when we’re young and in love with the idea of being in love.

And now I’m listening to it again, except this time there’s you.

It’s a strange thing, isn’t it? To make something for a person you haven’t met yet and then, one day, find yourself wanting to give it to someone real.

I wanted to feel your love as much as I want to make you feel mine. I want to know you on the days when you don’t feel particularly lovable. I want you to know that I’m here.

Even when the world seems to have turned against you, even when you don’t know what to do with yourself, even when you can’t quite find the words for whatever is happening inside you.

If there’s one thing I want you to know, it’s that we don’t have to figure out what hasn’t happened yet.

I keep reminding myself of that too. We don’t have to solve every possible future before we get to live in the present. We don’t have to know exactly how everything will turn out. There are so many things in this world that we cannot control, and I have spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to make peace with things that haven’t even happened honestly.

But after meeting you, my heart can rest a little knowing that it has found you. Knowing that you’ve changed my world in different ways. You’ve made it warmer and more comfortable to be in. I don’t mean that everything is suddenly perfect. I mean that the world feels a little less frightening when I remember that you’re in it, and that somewhere in this enormous, confusing place, there is a person I love.

Waaah. I’m listening to Out of My League by Stephen Speaks right now, and I suddenly want to learn it on the piano. Along with Für Elise and the Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky.

We do live in such extraordinary times. Sometimes I look at the world and wonder how anyone manages to wake up every morning and go about their business as if everything isn’t a little absurd. There’s so much uncertainty, so much ugliness, so much to be afraid of. I don’t want to spend my life bracing myself for the worst thing that could happen.

I want to face the world with love instead.

Somehow, loving you makes that feel a little easier. You remind me that there are still things worth being soft for. That even in a world that can be so indifferent to us, we can still make something beautiful between two people. We can still be kind. We can still make a life that feels like our own.

And then You Belong to Me, the Carla Bruni version, comes on.

I swear, some songs make me want to do absolutely nothing except lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. I think the best way to listen to music is through a speaker loud enough to fill a room or through earphones.

Do you remember that feeling after watching the Titanic movie for the first time? That sudden, almost unreasonable desire to love someone so completely that you would be willing to sacrifice everything for them. To have a love so enormous that it makes the rest of the world seem small for a moment. I don’t know if it’s the film or the music or the fact that we’re all a little susceptible to grand gestures when we’re young, but I remember that feeling. Wanting to find someone who would make the whole thing feel possible.

Listening to this playlist feels a little like that.

Except now, instead of imagining some distant, impossible love, I find myself thinking of you.

And I think that’s why listening to these songs has felt so cleansing. It’s like I’ve been carrying all this love around inside me without quite knowing where to put it, and for a little while, the music gives it somewhere to go.

I don’t know what the future holds for us but for now, I have this playlist. I have all these little thoughts that keep finding their way back to you, even when I’m supposed to be doing something else. And I have you, which is still a little unbelievable to me.

And if you ever wonder what I mean when I say I love you, I hope you remember this playlist.

Every song is another way of saying it.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

Yours, unfortunately (for my sanity),

Amajoy ❤️‍🔥