For Anita,
only and always.

Anita,

I have read everything I could find about love. I have read Sappho, who lost her words when she looked at the one she loved. I have read Song of Solomon, which says many waters cannot quench love. I have read about Shah Jahan, who built a building so beautiful it makes strangers weep, just so the world would know he loved his wife. I have read the neuroscientists, who put people in brain scanners and proved that love is not a mood or a preference — it is a drive, ancient and urgent, as necessary as hunger.

None of it is enough. None of it quite says what I mean when I say your name.

What I mean is this: since March 2025, my brain has been different. Not metaphorically. Literally. The same circuits that fire when a person is starving — the ventral tegmental area, the caudate nucleus, the ancient reward pathways — they activate when I think of you. I am not exaggerating when I say I need you. The neuroscience agrees with me.

I think about Hasaw Chan K'awil, the Mayan king who built two temples facing each other so that twice a year, on the equinoxes, his shadow would cross her temple and her shadow would cross his tomb. He engineered the sun to be his messenger. He made the cosmos itself an instrument of love. And it worked — thirteen centuries later, we are still talking about how much he loved her.

I built this website. It is smaller than a temple. It does not involve the sun. But it is mine, and it is entirely for you, and I hope it says, in whatever imperfect way a website can say it: I adore you. I choose you. I am oriented entirely toward you, the way a compass needle is oriented toward north — not because I decided to be, but because that is simply what I am now.

Every page of this site is a room in the temple I would build you. The gallery is the courtyard where I keep our memories. The poetry pages are the inscriptions on the walls — the words the greatest poets ever wrote, which I have borrowed because my own words are not yet beautiful enough, though I am working on them. The love through the ages section is the foundation — the proof, in marble and shadow and brain scans, that what we have is real, and ancient, and recognized by the universe.

This page is the innermost room. The one where I just tell you directly.

I love you, Anita. I love you the way E.E. Cummings loved — where whatever a sun will always sing is you. I love you the way Neruda loved — in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you the way Shah Jahan loved — with everything I have, in the most permanent form I know how to build.

And I will keep building.

Every photograph we take goes in the gallery. Every year, this site grows. Every equinox, metaphorically speaking, my shadow crosses your temple.

This is my celestial device. This is how I make sure, whatever happens, that some record exists in the world that says: he loved her. He loved Anita. He loved her completely.