How often do I say "I love you"?

So now that my date with D is over and I am at my conference for work, I am back to writing her e-mails. Only I really don't have much to say. After all, I was there in her house just a couple days ago, ... and it's not like this conference is exciting enough that I have a lot to say about it.

But then I started to think about it, and I realized tonight is not all that unusual. There are numerous times I don't really have much to say. Either nothing has happened that sounds remotely newsworthy, or else I do have news but nothing else. And a letter of chatty news itself sounds pretty superficial, or it can.

So I wrote to her this evening about this very conundrum, and explained that I realize "neither kind of letter [i.e., vacuous or merely newsy] ever says what I really want it to say. But then sometimes I'm not sure that what I really want to say is even expressible in a letter in the first place. Sometimes I think that the whole business of writing letters is just ever so slightly beside the point, even if it is all we've got most of the time. I write to you that I love you, but after a while that has to read like some kind of conventional formula -- surely nothing deep or gripping."

I thought about it some more, and it came out like this:


How often do I tell you "I love you"?
Sometimes I feel I never say 't at all.
Oh sure, I sign off letters thus, it's true;
But words dashed off by rote too quickly pall.

How can you know you're always by my side,
And that I talk to you throughout the day?
Or arch an eyebrow, crack a smile, confide
My fleeting, silent thoughts along the way?

Or if I steal myself a moment’s rest
Before I hurry off from Here to There,
Your spirit snuggles up within my breast,
And I can hear your whisper in the air.

How can you know you're every instant here,
If all I say is "I love you, my dear"?