To you,

You know how I leave lights on in rooms I’ve already walked out of? How you follow behind me, switch them off, and never say a word?

This is the same: a light left on in a room that you will never enter, and this time, no one is coming behind me to switch it off.

I’m leaving it on anyway.

You told me that you didn’t like it when I said “I love you more.” Every time I said it, you heard a dare, one that you have never agreed to play. I never once explained.

So, here is the explanation, years late, to an empty chair.

When I say “I love you more,” it is never a dare. I don’t mean more than you love me. I wouldn’t know how to measure that, and I would never try.

I just mean I love you more than the bad days ahead of us. Not the ones we survived, but the ones we haven’t met yet. The Tuesday where nothing is wrong and nothing is right. The morning one of us wakes up heavy and can’t say why. The week you’re stressed and I’m no help at all. I can already feel the shape of them, like the way your foot knows a step in the dark a half second before it lands. And I already know what I’ll do when they arrive: I’ll stay. A bad day is only weather. You’re where I live.

I mean I love you more than any fight we will ever have. It’s never the words that I remember. It’s the silence afterward: me at my computer, you at yours. Every small sound suddenly becomes deliberate. A sigh carries across the room like a slammed door. Still, I would sit in that loud silence a thousand times before I’d take the version of us where one of us stops coming back.

I mean I love you more than the distance between us. Not miles. The invisible kind, the kind that arrives without asking. Sometimes it has a name, like a worry you haven’t said out loud. Sometimes it has none, and you’re somewhere behind your eyes where I can’t follow. You’re an arm’s length away, and I can feel the width of it anyway. I’ve learned not to chase it, and not to pretend it isn’t there. I just stay close enough that you can find the way back.

I mean I love you more than anything that could stand in our way. Money. Time. Plans that don’t go the way we drew them. The old fear that something this good must come with a price. Let them stand in the hallway with their arms crossed, thinking they’ve blocked the way. To anyone else it would be a wall. To us it has only ever been a hallway, something we walk through together to the next room. They can dim the light, but they can never reach the switch.

And I mean I love you more than the facepalm. You know, that small yellow face with its hand pressed to its forehead, your only answer to my worst jokes, and I tell them every day. Thousands of them. You’re immune by now. I’ve learned to read that little face as an “I love you” in its own right: you stayed, you sighed, you answered. So I’ll keep telling them, and you’ll keep sending it, and I’ll take it. I always have, and always will.

You will never read this. It doesn’t change a single word of it.

I love you more.

Happy Meetiversary.