I love the smell of vanilla. I love greeny-velvety-yellow – the colour of light in a forest. I love Shakespeare comedies and I love dark chocolate. I love wearing lip balm, creamy and soft. I love brown – I love how rich and creamy it is – bold, soft and melted, subtle but wild – I love green. I love potent magenta and vintage turquoise and coral and yellow-orange and inky black. I love cream, maroon, and grey. I love fleece and corduroy and wood. I love the sound of crunching gravel underfoot. I love shiny, knobbly roots that look like dinosaur fossils. I love Dixieland jazz, passionate opera, cellos, trumpets, a yearning, yawning bass, a sultry saxophone. I love – I am wooed by – the clarinet: subtle, gentle, mellow, and teasing. I love tenor and bass voices and pure, sweet sopranos. I love holding hands, I love closing a book after reading the last page. I love crossword puzzles in the morning when no one else is awake. I love cereal, soggy or crunchy. I love sharp pencils. I love my collarbone. I love how people walk. I love trees – I love their silhouettes, how they sway, how tall they are, their grace, their majesty, how humble we must be in comparison, the confidence and passion with which they curve their roots into the ground, the texture of their bark, climbing them. I love doodling and sketching with soft pencils on thick paper, portraits, painting, photography. I love reading. I love dancing. I love jeans, pearls, tulips, magnolias, red roses, pink and orange roses, yellow roses, white roses, full open roses and reserved, elegant, tall deep red roses. I love candles and playing with the wax until I burn my fingers. I love sitting by the fire. I love hiking, lost on a mountain. I love waterfalls, I love effervescent, ever-flowing, effigy-carving streams that burn and boil and bubble and murmur forever and ever and ever. I love impossible concepts, I love thoughts with no answer. I love answers. I love understanding without words. I love descriptions and poetry. I love meaningful nonsense and making my own sense. I love tradition. I love concrete and satin, plaid and tartan. I love smiles, eyes, and the pattern on irises – rich, natural, resonant hazel, tempest blue, grass-textured emerald, coffee-brown. I love how light squeezes into arrows when I'm teary and gathers into rainbow beads on my eyelashes. I love how wind buffs my face. I love medieval-like fall and rustic winter, proud, naïve summer and delicate spring. I love spotlights, illuminating columns of dust in the air, victimising the soloist, beaming from the heavens. I love the ocean and I love the sky. I love golden-white sand, bleached, aged driftwood, myths, stories, legends. I love really good erasers. I love listening to people. I love my room. I love my house. I love silence and old photos and the moon when it’s just a sliver and when it's so big I think it has begun to swell. I love being alone and being alone with someone. I love maps and cultures and everything about travelling. I love light and how it plays with shadow. I love how words can change everything. I love connecting. I love huge comfy pillows with big gold tassels. I love thick wooden beams and high ceilings, red doors and long elegant drapes – like the curtains in a theatre. I love theatres, old and new. I love laughing at myself! I love laughing; I love whistling and humming, and singing when I'm alone. I love learning, I love irony, I love rainy days. I love rainy days because you’re allowed to be sad. I love rainy days because there is no reason to be sad. I love rainy days because they're like a child throwing a temper tantrum to make a point. I don't take them seriously, and they seem to understand. I love beautiful dark and rainy and so do I love brilliant and sunny. I love breezy, sunny, glowing summer days. I love not having a reason. I love the rush of possibility. I love blowing out candles and watching the smoke drift away into nothing – like barely tangible dreams! I love more than I can list.
I don't love everything in my world.
And I love people more than I have words to describe.