Partly Cloudy, 64°
I love you, darling. You are worth so much to me. You’re my friend, my lover, my confidante, my partner in crime. You mean everything in the world to me. It’s hard to put into words how I feel about you, because I have trouble differentiating between you and, say, a box of crackers, prescription toothpaste, a game of tetherball on an elementary school playground, and a disgruntled albatross. There is nothing you do not mean to me.
You are sunshine on a cloudy day, a bouquet of fragrant roses, those little plastic things that they put on the legs of stools so they don’t scuff the floor too badly, a fleet of fire ants, the wave pool at Six Flags, a muffin, a pink lawn flamingo, the Wikipedia article that could one day exist about the nuke that could one day be dropped on Chicago, a tango, a beatnik named Jerry or something like Jerry, a pen, a pig, a pigpen, Hewlett-Packard’s much-maligned Customer Service Department and the laughter of innocent children, sweetheart. Not only do I love you, but you are love itself, as well as nausea, pork rind, and the Janissaries, an order of elite Ottoman infantry.
Don’t think this is an easy thing for me to say. I’m making an effort here, because you’re my underappreciated F. Scott Fitzgerald novel “Tender Is the Night,” and I’ll do whatever I can to keep you around. I hope you can appreciate that.
When I hear your name, I can’t help but think of the surf crashing against the shore on a summer’s day in Marseilles, of a child’s laughter and of a roll of masking tape. Your smile reminds me of a sunrise, of the feeling you get when you think too hard about infinity, and of the expensive kind of graphic calculator that has games on it. When you speak I hear birds singing, the harps of Angels and Megadeth’s “Holy Wars,” arguably one of the greatest thrash metal tracks of all time. And when we make love, you are the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, but also the zombie version of my dead grandmother, which hopefully helps explain my reaction.
Like in all relationships, we’ve had our rough patches. You are, of course, the heat death of the universe and the pain of watching a friend die in your arms, and I know I can be a little bit clingy sometimes. But I hope we can work through these differences, and we can go back to simpler times, when you were my happiness, my cowardice, and my Steve Martin reboot of “The Pink Panther,” that wasn’t very good but was very quotable.
I don’t know what I’d do without you, in part because you’re such a large part of my life and in part because you’re such a large part of my vocabulary. I’d be lost if you ever left me, and there would also be so many things which I would be unable to refer to. I would lose everything.
I’ve never been great with words. My only hope is that you can see past my failings and appreciate that I love you. You are, after all, my mother to me.
