When we clattered across rusty cellar doors, shuttered against the oncoming rain, towards the promise of greasy, delicious dumplings in a rundown Chinatown joint, the subject of writing came up. We held hands casually, our joints sliding into place without fear of weaving a rigid basket with which to hold the other. You turned, your just-brown hair half-flopped towards half-arched eyebrows. You laughed, and you told me, “I can’t write about love.”

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I didn’t care, and still don’t. Long before that discussion, I had already fallen in love with you for your writing. When you mumbled to yourself, your eyelashes shifted slightly, following your own thoughts on the computer screen. I thought about putting my ear against those lips and letting your warm words breathe in my brain.

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I read your short stories, turning ten pages of script into eight pages of notes. Each sentence unboxed personhood, a telepathic connection straight to you. You wrote about green-gook aliens, blasé detectives, and mugs like Easter-eggs. I read it as autobiography.

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You steeped your heart in books and then poured it on the page. I could hear a writer when you slowly rolled words like “English” through your teeth with care, and made my name a marble with your tongue. I heard how your low, measured voice rounded your chest into church cavern archways—a nave filled with organ hymns. I picture those same notes filling children’s’ rooms with stories someday. Stories of our own.

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“I can’t write about love,” you told me. Weeks earlier, plastic lighting glared on synthetic red seats where a very real girl sat. The Metro North train barreled towards Manhattan, a screeching caged horse grinding against the bit, with my feet pointing the way. I liked to be moving forwards. At the precise moment I curled against 2 a.m. on the black window, my eyes dry from overuse, you texted me. The rest of the ride, the rest of my week, would be spent re-reading your words.

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You didn’t know it yet, but that was love. Your typed-out texts from your bed at night, musing on making me eggs in the morning—that’s how I knew. So, you can’t write about love. You write with it.

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Love is a feeling that runs above language. The feeling exists in the spaces where words aren’t, in the silence that follows a period.

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But it’s a feeling that compels us to try. So, we run after it with verbs and adjectives, chewing up empty white spaces, but still love glides untouched, off the page.

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Here’s our first draft. I’ll spend a lifetime chasing the words with you.