To My Love,

Obviously.
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M. Walshe

A dorky bit of Catullus-inspired prosetry

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 Amabo teI will love you. It's also an idiom for please, as in "I will love you,
if you do this thing I am asking." I will love you, it is true, but there is no if to my
love. Perhaps I had better say "te umquam amabo." I will always love you. If
Whitney Houston had studied with the Gregorian monks, they'd be playing our
song.
The perfect presents a problem. Theoretically, perfect love is something to
attain, but the only perfect thing is one to which nothing else can be added. A
perfect thing is a finished thing, which is why the term describes the past. I could
say "te amavi," but I never will, because I will never be done loving you more.
For the same reason, I'm loath to utter "te amaveram." I had loved you. I
suppose I could say I had loved you the moment I saw you, as you sat there
waiting for me to appear. That would be true. Yes. I will say that, as long as you
promise not to misconstrue the construction and think the loving stopped as far in
the past as it began.
Amavero te is safeI will have loved you (less today than I will tomorrow).
Now, the part I lay awake dreaming about in my bed: being loved. I am loved,
I will be loved, I have been loved by you. Amor te, te amabor, amata te eram.
These are the thoughts that play through my mind and give me wings that would
put to shame the fleet-footed son of Maia.
Latin has at least twenty distinct forms of the single, common verb for love.
Twenty different ways to say, "I love you" or "I am loved by you." If we played
with such tempting words as desire and cherish, we could spend an easy week
doing little but loving one another in Latin. Is it any wonder that her daughters
are considered the languages of love?
In French, I'd say "Je t'aime." I like you. Better yet, "Je t'adore." I love you. In
Italian, "Te amo."
German doesn't have much on these, but I can still say " Ich liebe dich." Do
you begin to catch my drift?
How many ways can I tell you that I love you? I adore, I cherish, I treasure
you. I love you from top to bottom, from side to side, inside and out.
If I thumb through my thesaurus looking for more words, I'm inspired by
each synonym for some kind of love. I am devoted to you. I worship the ground
you walk on. You are the one I fancywith a passion. You have all my affection: I
am entirely loyal. I am fully attached to you, my beloved, darling, dear, honey,
precious, sweet, sweetheart, true love.
(I might have to take exception to Roget's listing of "minion" under words for
"a person who is much loved." You are much loved by me, and I by you, but we
are neither of us the other's minion)
He even gives the poetic idiom, "light of one's life." You are, beloved, the light
of my life. But the text book example doesn't explain how heavily the shadows fall
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into night every time you walk out of the room, how the sun itself begs to rise
when it but hears of your coming.
English is a rich language, laden with the treasures of a hundred cultures its
speakers have ravished, but when I want you to know how much I love you, it is a
pauper. In Latin, French, German, Italian, there are many words and not enough.
If I could learn each idiom for adoration in each dialect spoken on this earth,
words would still fail me.
I only have the desire now to invoke Latin's hortatory subjunctive:
Amemus! Let us love!

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Copyright Note: This work is the sole property of the author and
may not be used without permission of the author, who can be
contacted at melissa.walshe@gmail.com.

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