Silverwood

A dear friend once wrote me this on a fragment of paper one evening after a long and boozy night packed to the brim with our usual debauchery. It had been some time since I had last read it, as it sat slowly fading in the sunlight where I stash the letters and cards I've received over the years:

Dear Liv,

My sweet girl, I love you for all you’ve changed & for all you’ve stayed the same. I think we see each other in a rare and valuable way, and I love you. I love your passion, I crave it.

 _____________________________

There's something so beautiful about the balance of it - how it admires change but assures me I was good enough to begin with. It's so concise in its expression and covers such ground in so few words. Sounds silly, but it makes my chest fill with butterflies and honey each time I read it, and sometimes it cracks my ribs, as if bone can no longer withstand the joy I am filled with to know I have friends who see me so entirely for who I am and choose to love me still.

To all my friends, I wish I could tell you this:

Your mind is a sweet, effervescent liquid that floods from your mouth like a stream of music cascading from rocks - sometimes harmonic, other times, dissonant and bombastic as you ooze, explode and seep out of yourself lacustrine, shimmering, electric. God it’s beautiful to watch you evolve in front of me like this, with all the light in your smile, in your eyes, in your warmth as you nod and listen with the tenderest of hearts. All this simple, simple light - this simple, simple, easy love that has withstood the harshest of winds and the wildest of nights. All around me you pour your huge reaching rays of thick light - heavy as honey - that soak over me and remind me that I am ever so sweetly stuck to you. Surround me with your sunshine, oh you deep sunset soul, burnt as the horizon and soft as the hills. Yes, we have been tested separately and together, but in this moment of surrender, the past no longer matters, because you’re present like you’ve always been present and you my darling friend remain as solid as the rocks that underpin your rapid torrents. What an unbearable, unmatchable and genuine pleasure simply to know you and call you a friend. Such relief you offer in this world of chaos and complexity, with your simple capacity to ebb and burn into the world as you do. Yes, it is true, you are atoms of glass spun finely in the kiln of your growth - Venetian, Favrile – something of an everything, as you shatter and form in the flurry of a continual flux.  Such a pleasure, such a blessing, such a beautiful thing to love you as I do. It’s enough for a lifetime to have shared even an evening with you, watching worlds form like whirlpools in your eyes.

If there was a soundtrack for how beautiful it is to feel this way it would probably be this:

Also highly amusing to know that many friends would read this and affectionately say "God, you're a soppy cunt".