I was lying in my bed at three in the morning, browsing through the selected pieces of the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beast exhibit, listening to Bon Iver’s first album (For Emma, Forever Ago), when the thought of our fifth monthsary crossed my mind. Happy monthsary, Love. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this satisfied with my life, so content but at the same time impatient and hungry for more.

I’m contemplating (to Skinny Love, Track 3) on how much I’ve grown these past five months of loving you and being loved. The changes and conversion, sometimes miniscule, sometimes more obvious than a stop sign, has somehow consumed me without noticing.

Where do I even start with all the things I’ve discovered about myself? In the process of loving you, I have learned to love who I am and who I am when I am with you. How could I have not known that I am actually very much able to love a person this, for the lack of a better word, intensely.

Shouldn’t this have happened when I was 16? When I was youthful and oblivious to evil.. to reality. When I have yet to know what love was, which meant I could pour my soul out and sell it to the devil without hesitation. When love seemed to be a romanticized idea of morning rays peeking through lace curtains, fingers intertwined and the belief of eternity.

These feelings and emotions and intensity and passion you conjure out of me, how is this all possible at 23? Nearing quarter life, a witness (and sometimes a victim) of how cruel life outside of television can really be, also a disappointed failure for a unicorn hunter, you learn that rainbows and butterflies and all that crap are just figments of your fucking imagination — because happiness is what you make of it, not a present wrapped in tinsel and christmas lights. My music player just started playing Bon Iver’s second album, Track 1 - Blood Bank. Funny, creepy in a way, how timely the song is.

“Then the snow started falling

We were stuck out in your car

You were rubbing both of my hands

Chewing on a candy bar

You said, “Ain’t this just like the present

To be showing up like this”

As a moon waned to crescent 

We started to kiss

And I said I know it well

That secret that we know

That we don’t know how to tell

I’m in love with your honor

I’m in love with your cheeks”

Having you is an infinite loop of Christmas mornings. The sound of ripping paper and the silence of anticipation — a present you open with gasps of shock, the astonished kind and not in horror. A gift that was not on the Christmas list but surprisingly made you feel like you’ve wanted it for what seems like forever. That’s you, love.. you’re a Christmas morning.

Once in a while, in the pile of presents, you open something disappointing or find exactly what you asked for or a trivial thing that’s useless or a tiny annoying one. But, it doesn’t matter does it? Because the pile is filled with love, filled with the thought that a person cared enough to wake up one day, think of you, choose to spend money not on themselves, stick their fingers together with tape, curse papercuts, and get down on their knees to crawl under the tree, just for you to shred it apart, rip it open, and decide whether it makes you happy or not.

Who you are is a pile of presents. Everyday, I shred you apart, I rip you open and I decide whether parts of what makes you who you are make me happy or not. You make me feel loved and I love you for willingly giving me a bit of yourself every single day.