The first time I said “I love you”, as a lost boy in the foothills of adolescence, the guy eyed me with a look of mistrust. “I don’t know why,” he said, somewhat missing the point. Had I been older or wiser, I might have said to him “You’re asking the wrong question. With love, there is no “Why?” Love just is.”

I fuddled with reasons, piling them up in front of him like tribute before a tyrant. And each he looked at with suspicion, before tossing them back on the pile. “But why?”

The second time I said it, though a man in aspect, I was no less lost, no less a boy. And she looked at me with eyes wide with disbelief, and repeated the words back to me. Had I listened closer, perhaps I would have heard the tones of disbelief behind the words. I heard the words, like a lifeline hurled out to a drowning man, and I held them no less tightly.

The seas were rough, and I held the line, dragged along in her wake. “This is love” I kept repeating to myself. “These are the stormy seas of love, but they will get better.” And the ideals of the first time were dragged from my side, until all that there was was the lifeline. Those three words, stretching between us. Until they snapped.

Suddenly I was at sea. Alone. There were no words, there was no love, and I bounced from pocket of calm to pocket of calm, until the time I nearly said it a third time. Before the words were said, the guy threw them back at me. he stamped on them. He utterly destroyed them. And suddenly everything was blackness. There was night in my soul.

And those words, they were just show. They were just like any other words. No magic, no art, no beauty. The world was darkness.

Through that darkness I walked, faltering. There were walls ahead. The world was bleak and black. I stumbled. I fell. I hurt so much. Until the point came when there was a faint light ahead. A little dancing flame. I held that flame, against the darkness, and I kept walking onwards. A man joined me in the darkness. He walked alongside me. Lifting me up when I fell, supporting me when I could not walk. Others came out of the darkness too. Old friends, new friends, everything turning into a new pattern, swirling around me. And there he was, at the centre of that pattern.

And then came the fateful day, when I stepped out into the sunlight again. The darkness over, the battle won. And the third man was still there. I thought of the words, and worried that I still had no reason. I still had no why. I pulled at them myself. Would they break loose? Would I be lost at sea again? Could I survive?

A man in aspect and in apprehension now, I still viewed the world with the fears of the boy. Like a syrupy, soupy mixture, churning away in a vat the words churned. They boiled, like the acid in the stomach. They were uneasy, bubbling up, and ebbing back. I was uneasy with them.

And when I said it. When I threw those words out, “I love you,” he caught them. I threw them carefully, cautiously, apologising for my own temerity. He looked at them, and asked me no whys. He held them carefully, turning them over in his hands, all the while watching me with a smile on his lips. He didn’t repeat them.

With a look that said “It took you long enough to say it”, he tied the lifeline to his waist, and suddenly, I saw love as God might. Suddenly, it was as though heaven opened, and all the seraphic bells pealed out.

Just that, love accepted, not denied.