I love you like it is my job to do so, proudly wearing the badge that says Employee Of The Year. At each year's end, I will beg for another contract, refusing to project my energy elsewhere.

Even though I am as unknown to you as last season's dead leaves, my love is stronger than the mighty elm that once held them. I am the little bird at the top of the bare branch you have not seen, cheering for you as you soar to your own heights without me.

Some may call what I am doing wrong. I think not. I truly mean no harm. What is done in the name of love can only be right. Agreed? Perhaps our buildings were built with a future intent. Brick by brick a lovestruck mason could have surmised. "What if a man were to gaze out from this very window and look down. What would he see?" Yes. It all makes sense. He built this window where I sit for me; where I watch you read by the light shining in from the sun through your window illuminating each of your features; your silky brown hair, your golden skin, the slope of your nose casting just the right amount of shadow over your lips, all created by the hand of a generous God.

I can only hope someday you will look up directly at me and know, better yet we will meet down in the courtyard. Our eyes will lock and you will understand that I am the one you have been waiting for. I am the one that has loved you long before you were born and I will love you until my last dying breath and beyond. Even if my love should remain anonymous, if my love for you is not seen, how does that mean it does not exist? True love cannot hide from itself. And if it is blind, then let me be guilty.

Are you reading love poems today? Search for me in the words. Find me there if nowhere else, my love. In this lifetime or the next, I am all yours.

Everyone knows that when someone is hurting, they are heavier.

The light in their eyes turns to sludge, and it sinks down into the soles of their feet, swamping the skipping joy in the tips of their toes.

Their lips are bowed, gently tugged downwards by the weight of their pain, and betraying everything and nothing all at once.

Their back is arched, burdened by the world, hauled down by it. The body curves and stays that way, more like stone every day.

But hardest to see and even harder to bear is in the heart. Every hurt is a pebble, threaded onto heartstrings, sinking below the tip of the breastbone like a necklace.

This heaviness is within, invisible, and its weight is the fiercest, drawing shutters over the eyes, and catching you in time like molasses, creeping and consuming and forever-seeming.

Sometimes the heartstrings snap, and with a gasp, the pebbles clatter down into the soul, the soles of the feet, and then you cannot move, only weep as your broken heartstrings hang limp behind your ribs. The pebbles turn your feet, your legs to stone, and however much you may wish to run, you cannot.

Sometimes people endure so many small heavy hurts that the pebble necklace grows too long. Long enough that it wraps around their neck and their wrists and covers their eyes and gags them, and they are changed, chained.

Sometimes the pebble necklace in someone's heart drags them straight to their grave.

Sometimes the pebbles are so heavy that life and light and laughter are hopeless.

Sometimes the necklace chokes you.

Sometimes it breaks.

But sometimes you can slide you fingers between your ribs, draw those heartstrings out from their cage, and however painful it may be, you can slip the pebbles from the necklace.

one

by

one.

Count them.

Polish them.

Kiss them.

And eventually, cast them away.