'I love you' means more than itself, it means nothing, and everything. It means that I cannot now live without your voice in my head and my heart, whispered softly in early morning, lucid dreams in which your skin finds mine and we are suffused with warmth and a gentle, deep arousal that is beyond everything; utter rapture.

It means that you have infiltrated desires and abilities that I have always had and never known, and gifted them to me with a deft flourish and a heartstopping smile, halting me in my tracks, making me aware of myself and of you and the myriad possibilities that are all caught up in us.

I tell you in the spaces between these words that you are my dearest friend and only love, that I do not exist in any real way without you; you make me true.

'I love you' cannot mean these things, and yet it means all of them, and everything, and nothing, and when I say it to you I hope that you will hear the catch in my throat as the words fall into your waiting hands, my gift, all and everything I have; now yours.