An Updated Self-Portrait, February 14, 2021
Dear First and Forever Valentine,
You're my absolute most favorite person in the multiverse, and I’m madly in love with you.
I love your ample body that's soft and warm and flexible and SO, SO STRONG. I love your legs that carry you on so many adventures and your gorgeous feet that refuse to be oppressed by shoes. I love your pillowy tummy and your sexy butt and your asymmetrical breasts with those steel barbells through the nipples. I love your talented hands that cook amazing foods and fix broken things and type epic novels and hold so tightly to friends in hugs. I love your beautiful color-changing hair and your luscious lips and those bright green eyes that never miss a thing.
I love that you have limitless dreams and ginormous, world-changing goals and that you believe in endless possibilities and serendipity and manifesting and magic as much as you believe in DOING THE WORK. I love that you will always put in the time to build something from nothing, to power through the barriers, to get shit done.
I love your frequent hypermanic episodes for their explosions of creativity and their impulsive phone calls to old friends and their extra dance breaks and their latest obsessions. I love your loud, busy brain because all that noise is information and language and music and imagination and entire worlds of stories. I love that it loves to learn and that even though it sometimes forgets very important things, it clings desperately to interesting facts about animals and the paranormal and outer space. I love that you’re as smart as you are smart-ass, that you’re clever and sarcastic and that you attract those same kinds of kindred spirits.
I love that in thirty-three years, six months, and twenty-three days you HAVEN’T STOPPED PLAYING. Or solving puzzles. Or wondering. Or wandering. Or trying new things.
I love that you've claimed all your experiences and your mistakes and your traumas as part of your intricate narrative and that you study them to better know yourself. To know what you want. To know what you’ll accept from others and what you won’t. I love that you’ve filtered out the toxic waste and surrounded yourself with a chosen family who gives you so much understanding and support and encouragement and who accepts those things from you too.
I love your vibrant energy and your fierce passion and your unrivaled enthusiasm for life and everything in it. I love that you get excited about every squirrel or bee or moonrise you see and that your favorite colors are ALL OF THEM. I love that you experience everything so fully and so deeply, that emotions fill you up to overflowing and pour out of you in waves of tears and fits of laughter and bursts of spontaneous song, sometimes all in the same chaotic moment. I love that you’re happy but never complacent and that you get really angry about things that really matter. I love that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, you choose to see the best in humans, to truly appreciate their charming idiosyncrasies and to believe we’re all capable of great things.
I love that you care so goddamn much. That you empathize so completely with the suffering of your fellow earthlings, even when it hurts. That even when you’re overwhelmed by sadness or disgust or rage, you still fight for them. You still speak for them. You still believe things can be better.
I LOVE THAT YOU LOVE SO FUCKING HARD. It’s intense and relentless and way too much for some people, but it’s not too much for me. You are never too much for me. You’re my everything, and you are perfect.
Copyright ©2017 by Angie Tonucci. All rights reserved.