Sometimes in the mornings, brought on by some odd combination of hormones and medicine and coffee, I become overwhelmed with the most bittersweet feeling of love for my friends. I don't question it, I don't write it off to chemicals and say "It's not really me" because I know that it actually IS me, it's one of the purest versions of me, and while I sit there with a goofy smile on my face and tears in my eyes, I am privy to the answer of the one question to which I can never find the words: Why do you love me?
Let me explain, if I can. You've been there, in that deer in the headlights moment, when a person in your life asks you that question, right? And you stammer, you stumble, you try to give the answer your full effort, you try to make it seem heartfelt and real and meaningful and, no matter what you say, no matter how they take it, you always feel as though you didn't get the words just right, that you didn't explain your heart. Right? Well, think about it; how do you condense a billion moments, a TRILLION moments, into words? You can't! I bet you can't even satisfactorily explain what LOVE is, so how is it that you think you can explain WHY you love someone?
So words can't explain a trillion moments, we know this, and yet I say I have the answer in that moment of chemically induced, bittersweet, emotional clarity. Do I? Well, no, not really, not in words that will mean anything to you. What I have in that moment is the signature left by each of those moments, stored in my brain in the part that I never feel I use and, in the way I need words to communicate with others, those chemicals communicate with me. It's not a very straightforward conversation and I admit that I'm not very skilled at the language, but it is the answer, as clear as that answer has ever been. And in the way that a tired mother, weary from a day of her three year old's apparently endless capacity to utter the word "why", the worded answer that my brain and I finally agree upon is "Because".
