Always on My Mind
When it comes to the 5 love languages, no one wants to say gifts. Saying that your love language is gifts is like a dog whistle for potential suitors that you’re materialistic, vain, greedy, and shallow. All she cares about is stuff. I disagree.
But I love gifts! Both giving and receiving. Giving gifts is a very natural way for me to express love and care for other people. There’s a lot of reasons why, but at the end of December I finally put my finger on it. When you give someone a gift you are telling them:
“I was thinking about you when you weren’t around. I was existing completely separately from you, and I saw something that reminded me of something you said. You didn’t think anything of it. Then I was out and about and not thinking of you. But as I was existing separately from you and thinking of not-you…I thought of you. I thought of that thing you said. Then I thought everything else about you. As if my mind wanted you here so badly it remembered every way you’ve looked and sounded in order to bring you to me. Our greatest hits shuffled through my mind and I felt so warm and happy knowing that you are in my life. You are important to me. You are valuable to me. And while I try to show my affection many ways, here is a thing. Something that now exists for you and aims to provide beauty, comfort, or convenience. You are with me no matter where you are,”
That’s my exact feeling.
It reminds of one of my favorite poems from John Donne called “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”
In the poem, John Donne addresses his wife Anne and discusses a very long separation they must endure as he travels to continental Europe on business. And even though they would be so far away, Donne describes tether as being like gold: even when it is stretched paper-thin, it does not break. To Donne, him and Anne mirrored the two feet on a compass (like you used in Geometry!) Anne (the center foot) grounds him and keeps him steadfast. And no matter how the John (the other foot) may travel, he is connected to Anne, always. Even in their separation, they are connected. This is what giving a gift reminds me of.
“A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Hi! I’m Anna Carter, a GFE escort in Manhattan, NYC. I’m originally from Atlanta, GA.