Things I Love. A Tribute

On building a life of words

I love. That could be the end of the sentence, but I love sentences… is what Andrea said in a post that so far has two thousand, seven hundred and eighty seven hearts and I read that sentence over and over. Thinking oh, how I love sentences, too.

I love the way you can absolutely love a person you’ve never met, love that fills you to overflowing and spans oceans and skies and years and age and miles and exists for no other reason except the way they arrange words on a page or screen or in your heart.

I love the way someone who has never touched your body, never rested a hand gently on your shoulder, never laced fingers into yours, never wrapped arms around you or buried their face in your hair can reach inside and touch your soul. With words.

I love the way it doesn’t matter if they know you.

I love the way it doesn’t matter if they love you back.

I love that we think it’s their words we love when really, it’s their soul.

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I love sentences that are a warm blanket on a cold winter day, words that wrap around us for some tiny pocket in time and in that moment everything is okay and life is good even if it’s never going to be good again or maybe not for a long time.

I love sentences that gut me like knives.

I love sentences that make me ache from the bottom of my heart and words that take me from the pit of despair to giddy joy like a glorious roller coaster of emotion.

I love the way Mary Oliver said she doesn’t know how to pray but she knows how to fall in the grass and feel blessed and watch a grasshopper eating sugar from her palm, moving it’s jaws back and forth instead of up and down and I love the way words can make me feel things that I had no words for until another writer gave them to me.

I love the way words are a gift writers give to the rest of us for no reason except that they must, I love that for some people words are as necessary as the air we breathe.

I love when I bleed words from my fingers even though Hemingway didn’t say that and someone comes along and says I made them cry and I fall on my knees in the grass because all I ever wanted to do was touch someone’s heart. With mine.

I love the magic of stories and storytellers. I love that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote a story for children about a man getting in an airplane and disappearing and then he got into an airplane and disappeared and I love the way his simple story about love seen through the eyes of a child has the power to make grown adults weep.

I love the way words explode in my heart like Kerouac’s fireworks and I stand at the side of the road in utter wonder at the magic of words and all I can say is oh!

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I love the way words can be the hand that leads you out of the woods when you’re lost and I love the way words can be the hand that pushes you into a pit of despair so deep you don’t know how you’re going to climb out or if you will, but when you’re in there weeping and mulling on words we learn something about who we really are.

I love the way our stories and the words we use to tell them aren’t the same because it means there is infinite space to grow as writers and artists.

I love that words can help us grow if we aren’t too attached to them, if we can hold them lightly with our hearts instead of our egos and our ideas of right and wrong.

I love the way we can read someone else’s words and see the world through their eyes and through their eyes and their words we can learn to get our own words just a little closer to the way they feel in the deep, dark and hidden recesses of our hearts.

I love sitting outside in the dead of night watching the moon and knowing it’s the same moon Van Gogh painted through the window of that asylum, the same moon Sylvia wrote poetry under, the same moon Hemingway watched staring out a window in France with a half empty glass of wine in his hand, the same moon that shone through the window where Edgar Allan Poe lay dying in a stranger’s clothing.

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In 2021, Andrea Gibson started a blog called Things That Don’t Suck. A few weeks later, the cancer diagnosis came. What a terrible time to write about what doesn’t suck, Andrea said. And in a blink of stunning awareness — what a perfect time.

That’s what Meg said in a post that has four thousand, eight hundred, fifty seven hearts this morning and I hope you’ll read it and I hope it’ll hit you the way it hit me because life is precious and ephemeral and we don’t know how long we have.

I love that it was raining when I read the news so I stood in front of the window while raindrops pelted the glass and pelted the leaves of the elm trees out my window while tiny finches and sparrows took shelter deep inside the tree and I took a photo.

I love that I hate photos of myself as much as I love words and beautiful sentences.

I love that words and photographs and art are just snapshots of one moment in time and I love that when you strip away everything else, time is all we really have, isn’t it?

I love that after more than twenty years writing since the days of submissions sent in a manila envelope I still don’t know if my words are any good and I love that it keeps me hungry and striving and I hope they didn’t suck. And I love that you read them.

Sometimes the break in your heart is like the hole in the flute.
Sometimes it's the place where the music comes through.
-Andrea Gibson, 1975-2025