Title: (untitled)
Author: Anonymous
Date: Summer 2018
Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 1
Notes: First appeared untitled in Attakattak (aka “feuille de chou(x)”, “de Bruxelles” to be more precise for the cabbage enthusiasts), Issue 2

Because there are not enough words in this language to describe what I feel for you and what you mean to me. Because too often our love is considered as insubstantial and dispensable. I would like to say I love you. And I would like, if the others don’t understand, that for once they shut up. Since there is not a word that really speaks of us, I would like to use for you those that seem to me the strongest, the most alive, the most passionate. I would like that the “I love you”’s also belong to us, that “love” is what we share, I would like to call you my beloved or my love without being asked questions or without our relationship being requalified in less powerful terms. I would like to be able to love you without making anyone uncomfortable, I would like to speak about love without conforming to all the characteristics that are associated with it. I don’t have a definition of what love might be, I think it is expressed in 1000 different ways. Here, I would like to speak to you about what we share, about this feeling that I’m part of you forever without belonging to you.

Due to their shitty world, their rules about relationships and sex, it took me too long to understand that I love you, that it is that and yes, it is unique and crazy, that it is like us. It took me too long to understand, due to their romantic model, poetry and songs, that what we were living was strong and precious and that it was worth it to give it its space. I believed for too long that our relationship was a crutch and not a backbone. I believed for too long that what was between us was self-evident, instead of understanding that everything was still to be invented. We love each other as we can, with our shortcomings, our clumsiness and our silences, but above all we love each other as we want, without enclosing ourselves, without forcing ourselves, without deceiving ourselves. We don’t share everything, we can tell each other no, we can even not touch each other or not see each other. We can do all of this because we love each other and don’t possess each other. Because I think that love can only be lived in freedom, that a caged love is a love that conceals its dependence and its anxiety badly. I don’t want that you love me because you owe it to me, because it is more moral or I don’t know what bullshit. I don’t want that you love me because without me you wouldn’t have any reasons to live. I would like you to love me because it is doing you good, because you feel like it, because instead of limiting you, it multiplies you. I would like that loving me makes it so that you can love others. And vice versa.

I think that each person, each living being is unique, I think that no one could ever replace you in my life and in my heart, because no one is you. Your way of being unique fascinates me, I fell in love with it. I know you well enough, and I know myself even better, to know that I love you and your 1000 particularities. I’m not saying I love everything in you, that would be equal to loving nothing at all. This is what I’m trying to say to you; that I’m not dependent on our relationship, that it is your being and its complexity that attracts me and keeps me, that I make sure to love you and not only “us”. Besides, our relationship and our commitments that flow from it change according to our desires and our movements. Over time, what one brings and what one asks have evolved, nothing is fixed, we are moving and so also is our love. As long as somewhere on this earth I know you’re alive, that your being can always be what it is, then I know that everything is possible between us.

It is for all these reasons that the only promise I can and want to make you is that I will always love you. I know it is not a mathematical certainty, like it is not a certainty that I will be alive tomorrow, so many things can happen to us. But with what I know here and now I can affirm that I feel like loving you till I cannot love any more. Thus, it is not this crazy promise that keeps us in love, on the contrary, it is from our magnificent love that the desire to keep each other company forever comes. And so, if the reasons for which I hold you so dear to my heart come to pass, if our desires and our paths come to oppose each other, our promise wouldn’t have any sense any more. Besides, if I wouldn’t resemble any more the person that you loved, if my new identities come to contradict what you cherish in me, then I hope that you as well would leave… What is important to me is what I feel now, while promising to love you forever, I promise most of all to love you immensely here, as I’m speaking to you. That seems contradictory, but I think that in reality it is one and the same thing. I know that you also love me, all that is certain, what is not is life and it can change everything. I will not always be here, I will maybe not always love you exactly like you wish, you will not be everything for me and I will not be everything for you. But I have enough confidence in what you are to know that your being will always be dear to me because it is wonderfully unique and irreplaceable. Life without you would not be impossible, it would be terribly more empty and grey. As a life always and only with you would be cruel to me. But there is an unstable equilibrium between our promise, that sense of eternity, and our desires for somewhere else and for freedom, that equilibrium is our desire to love each other.