Expressing affection in the utterance of the words “I love you” seems so simple, but it was a phrase I could never tell my parents or brothers. I love you. I love you. It should not be such a strenuous task. Tenderness was never my forte. With significant others, I constantly choked on the words; my trembling carcass spilled out with saliva and waste, but never an I-love-you. I wrote small essays delineating my fondness for people before and struggled orate the painful passages. I felt myself suffocating with the phrase lodged in my throat. My fondness can be found in a mess of unsent, unspoken written letters and in the white emptiness of a Word Document where I deleted a typed message. My love is evident in my counter-productive struggle to permanently leave parasitic individuals in my life. Much of my thoughts about them remain locked in the safety of my head, partly because an I-love-you is not enough, and partly because my verbal delivery of the words will taint the purity and meaning behind the words.

However, when I attach an I-love-you next your name, it seems to fit naturally in my mind.