I love you like spoonwalkers love spoons. But there’s only one of you, so I cannot show my adoration by piling you into heaps and then laying my eggs on you.

I love you like the mist loves the island. Clammy and clinging, wanting to wrap myself around you so entirely that my dampness permeates you, right to the depths of your soul. I want to be the reason you can’t see the sun, the reason you shiver at night. Breathe me in, feel me on your skin. I will never leave you.

I love you the way very small cows love hiding under things where there really speaking isn’t enough room for them in the first place.

I love you like donkeys love being on roofs. Some things don’t have to make sense. It isn’t about physics, or physiognomy.  It’s the uncanny clatter of hooves at night when there is no sensible way the hooves could have got to a place of clattering. Love is irrational like this.

I do not love you in the way that tentacles love everything. Tentacles are indiscriminate, and will give their attention and affection to absolutely anything. It means nothing, to have the emotional promiscuity of a tentacle. To sneak into everything, as tentacles like to do, writhing shamelessly for anyone to see them. Not like that, then. My love is more subtle and particular, although given half the chance, I would certainly slide, tentacle-like across your face in the darkness. But only your face, no one else’s would do.

(Image and text entirely the responsibility of Nimue Brown.)