unconditional

It has taken me a long time, but I think I finally understand what it means to love unconditionally. It is not a matter of not having wishes or desires. I may desire to be with you, that you might love me as I love you, but such desire does not determine my relationship to you or how I treat you. My love for you extends beyond our interactions, in fact, extends far beyond whether my wishes and desires are ever fulfilled. I love you and your singular nature. I love you and your godlike being that shines from within. I love you and your absurd sense of humor. I love you in your moments of sadness, and weakness, and contradiction. I love you even if you do not love me. I love you even if you love someone else. I love you for all the things you are, which includes the ugly bits, the difficult bits, the occasionally unreasonable bits, in fact, I love you because all the aspects of your personality and behavior comprise your uniquely beautiful and beautifully human way of walking through the world. I love your strength and fragility. I love your fierceness and your stubbornness. I love your laughter and your perception and your process of discovery and growth. I love that you challenge me to be greater than I am and that you challenge yourself. I love that, despite observing all the crushing realities around you, still you possess a childlike wonder and a kind, loving heart, still see the sublime beauty of the world, and that this is not the result of ignorance, willful or otherwise, or a filtering of fact; you see all that is harsh, inconsistent, and cruel, and yet you still go on seeking truth and seeing beauty and growing every day more lovely. And yet I also love you independently of all this. I love you even as you stumble or fail, even when you don't make any sense to me. I love you when you are present and when you are gone and I will love you even if you become to me only a memory. I think I even understand now what it must mean to love as a mother loves her child, in that my love for you is full of such tenderness that even if I were to watch you grow distant from me and we were to eventually part ways, I would love you still more fiercely, so that whenever you felt low, or wanted a friend, or simply wished to look back to see where it was you had been, how far you'd traveled, you might be buoyed by my love and it might give you some measure of strength or peace or pleasure for all the rest of your journey in this space-time continuum or any other.