A hundred romantic, sweeping speeches rush through me. All the things I should have said in the ballroom. All the things I’ve written about for years, the fairy tale endings and romantic stories that circled my fantasies. They collide against every moment I’ve spent with him—how I’m terrified but it’s a good terror; how I’m anxious but it’s a good anxiety. In some alternate version of me, I weave such a poetic sonnet that it brings us both to our knees. But all I can say, in the dimness of this starlit reality, is “I love you.”
