Love in the time of magic

Dear QiuQiu -
You have changed me already. Even before I know you. Even before you and I lay eyes on one another for the first time. Even before we touch. I am a changed person.

Since the day I first heard of you, I see magic everywhere.

Every moment is enchanting. Every shift of the light among branches. Every scent that rolls in on the breeze.

I take a breath, and my lungs are filled with butterflies, fluttering lightly against the walls of my chest.

I open my eyes in the morning and the world is transformed. A new place. Full of possibilities. Never has there been a time, even in my bright world, of such optimism and promise.

My microcosm, now, is fuller for the addition of you. You have opened my horizons and added fathomless depths to the layers of my existence.

I have spent plenty of time on myself in this lifetime. Although there were times when I didn't understand myself, times when I hardly knew myself, in recent years I have come to know myself well. I have become at peace with myself. Now, it's time for me to think of you.

In return for what you have already done for me - this gift of an enchanted new life - I want to give that enchantment back to you, and in spades.

I want to fill your life with magic, shimmer and spangle it, imbue it with all the wonders of the wide world.

I want to give you the joy of learning, the gift of discovery, the pleasures of curiosity. I want to show you the length and breadth of the beautiful world in which we live, in all its grand cycles of wealth and poverty, bounty and tragedy, endings and new beginnings .

I have had a fortunate life. I've been given love and good counsel, taught what to value. I have been shown the world. Now is my time to take what I've learned and pass it on to you. Now is the time for me to paint your world as mine was painted for me.

I want you to know the taste of honeysuckle, the smell of sweet jasmine on the vine. I want you to taste on your lips the dust of the desert blowing in on a hot wind, smell the spices of Eastern marketplaces. I want your fingers to be dyed with the juice of fresh-picked berries, and your head to be lightened with the perfume of ozone after a rain, the smell of new-mown grass.

I want you to know what it is like to go to bed tired with travel, your feet dirty from the dust of remote byways, your head heavy with the rocking of a cross-country train.

I want you to cock your ears, trying to decipher the words of unknown tongues. I want you to think about the many and diverse cultures of the world, and struggle to understand their ways of thinking. I want you always to question and never to take for granted. I want you to know the intense pleasure of simple things.

QiuQiu, I know that I will not always please you, nor you me. I hope that we will always respect one another, and share the kind of abiding love that supersedes those moments of displeasure.

I hope that our best moments are the moments of tranquility, the moments of complicity and quiet contemplation, the same moments that my own mother and I have so loved to share over the years.

I hope we can share our ideas and ideologies, bounce ideas off one another, learn from one another. I hope that each of us will be that much greater for the addition of the other. I want to offer you information without dictating how you receive it. I want to give you the world and watch you translate it in your own mind.

This is my wish for you. Until soon, and thanks for all the enchantment!
Love, me.