You I Love
When I was a young child my mother taught me, when you love a person, you tell them. She said your last words to someone you love should always be:
I love you.
Because we don’t know when those last words will be.
I tried to comprehend this, with the overly literal mind of a child;
if the last words you said to someone was ‘I love you’, the last word you said was ‘you’, not ‘love’.
So, for the remainder of my childhood the farewells that followed, to my mother, were accompanied not by an ‘I love you’ but instead a more practical:
You I Love.
Practical in the sense that if I dropped dead that afternoon at least the last word she ever heard me say was:
Love.
And when someone else told me that saying ‘I love you’ too much cheapened its meaning, i thought:
love isn’t money. If it was, I’d be rich.
That’s what my mother taught me,
the only thing that matters when you die is the love that you leave behind.
These days I add an ‘I love you’ to a ‘goodbye’ like it’s ketchup to fries
and years after I stopped saying ‘you I love’, while on the other side of the planet I am still surrounded by the same love my mother showed me then.
It’s everywhere.
It’s there when my friends and family call from Melbourne, just to check in.
It’s in the kindness of my colleagues and flat mates who have done everything they can to make this place feel like home.
It’s in the smile of a stranger on the street, or on the tube when a man stands up and gives up his seat.
And while some love is less permanent, as romantic love tends to fall out a hole in the side of my pocket, and some friendships naturally, gently, grow apart, one is constant:
You I love.
You I love,
because at Victoria Street I got used to falling asleep to the sound of you typing on a keyboard. The battle sounds of a single mum running a business with two boys in the room next door.
You I love,
because every time I walk alone with a woman on the street, I quietly swap places to make sure I’m between her and the passing traffic, just like you taught me.
You I love,
because I remember the many times you drove me to the children’s hospital in the dead of the night when I was having an asthma attack.
I remember looking out to the lights of the Bolte Bridge while hyperventilating in the back of your car and somehow they calmed me. Somehow they still do.
I remember hours later playing on the hospital playground carefree and unaware of how terrified you must of felt in those moments. You would have had two hours sleep those nights, and yet
You l love,
because you woke up, got your boys ready for school, and went to work the next day, like nothing happened.
You I love,
because every night you told me you loved me all the way up to the sky and all the way back again. So now I look to the stars at night knowing although you’re on the other side of the world you’re looking back at the same ones I am.
You I love,
because in the card you gave me before I left you wrote ‘love from your mother, the first woman to ever love you.’
You I love,
Because I am so profoundly lucky to have had a woman like you bring me into this world and love me ever since.
Mum,
Thank you.
To the stars and back, always, and forever,
You I love.
-Samuel
