A Complete List of the Love Notes in The Illumination
(By request, here is a complete list of the daily love notes Jason Williford leaves his wife Patricia in my novel The Illumination, around which much of the book’s action is orchestrated. You can find two additional 365-love-note sequences—or rather one set of “I love you” notes and one set of “I miss you” notes—on the book’s Twitter page.)
I love those three perfect moles on your shoulder—like a line of buttons.
I love the sound of your voice over the phone when you’re trying to hide the fact that you’re doing a crossword puzzle from me.
I love your lopsided smile.
I love the way you leave a little space between each piece of bacon on your plate: “amber waves of bacon.”
I love the way you sway and close your eyes when you’re listening to a song you like—a dance, but only from the waist up.
I love that moment in bed when you first climb on top of me, and the uprooted smell we leave behind when we’re finished.
I love the feel of your hands on my cheeks, even when they’re “‘cold as tea.’ ‘Hot tea?’ ‘No, iced tea.’”
I love the fact that when you accidentally pick up a hitchhiker, what you’re worried about is that he’ll steal the DVD’s you rented.
I love your fear of heights and bridges.
I love the way you can be singing a song, and all of a sudden it will turn into a different song, and you’ll keep on singing and won’t even realize it.
I love the ball you curl into when you wake up in the morning but don’t want to get out from under the covers.
I love the last question you ask me before bedtime.
I love the way you alphabetize the CD’s, but arrange the books by height.
I love you in your blue winter coat that looks like upholstery fabric.
I love the scent of your hair just after you’ve taken a shower.
I love the way, when I take my wedding ring off to do the dishes, you’ll put it on your finger and walk around the house saying, “I’m married to me, I’m married to me!”
I love how nervous you get when I’m driving.
I love the way you say all the things you dislike are “horrible”—and how, when you’re really upset, you pronounce it “harrible.”
I love the little parentheses you get beside your lips when you’re smiling—the way the left one is deeper than the right.
I love the fact that I know I can keep telling you things I love about you for the rest of our lives and I’ll never run out.
I love to wake up in the middle of the night and listen to you sleeping: the funny noises you make when you dream, the tiny pop of your lips separating.
I love kissing your tattoos one by one—first the bracelet on your ankle, then the heart on your shoulder, then the Celtic knot on the small of your back.
I love the photograph of you your parents keep by the front door, that little girl in her glasses and her Holly Hobbie dress.
I love the way you kiss.
I love the way you shake your head when you yawn.
I love the “magically delicious” doodles you make when you’re talking on the phone: stars, moons, hearts, and clovers.
I love to look up and see you sitting beneath the lamp in the living room—reading a book, or staring out the window, or chewing the end of a ballpoint pen.
I love how soft your hands are, even though hand lotion is disgusting goop and you’ll never convince me it isn’t.
I love the way you line your brushes up on the vanity like silverware.
I love knowing that if there’s a restaurant I want to try, I’ll get to try it with you; if there’s a movie I want to see, I’ll get to see it with you; if there’s a story I want to tell, I’ll get to tell it to you.
I love your giggle fits.
I love the names you’ve had picked out for 25 years: “Mira” if it’s a girl, “Henry” if it’s a boy.
I love sticking your name in songs where it doesn’t fit the rhythm: “Patricia Williford, why don’t you come to your senses?”
I love the way your face falls whenever you see my handwriting on an envelope.
I love how easy it is to aggravate you.
I love waking up next to someone else in the morning.
I love the concavities behind your knees, as soft as the skin of a peach.
I love how disgusted you get by purées: “Who would do that to a poor defenseless soup?”
I love waking up on a wintry morning, opening the curtains, then crawling back under the covers with you and watching the snow fall.
I love the spaghetti patterns you leave on the wall.
I love the shape of your legs inside your brown leather skirt.
I love how quietly you speak when you’re catching a cold.
I love hearing you tell the cockatoo story to people who don’t know it yet.
I love watching you step so carefully inside your footprints when it snows.
I love the way you hunt for our names as the movie credits scroll by—“thirteen Jasons and not one Patricia.”
I love it when you wear my blue jeans, even if you do, too, drip chocolate sauce on them.
I love listening to you pick out a song you don’t know on the piano.
I love the way you’ll try to point out a star to me over and over again sometimes: “That one. Right there. Can’t you see it? Just follow my finger.”
I love the lines that radiate from the corners of your eyes when you smile, and I’ll love them even more when they’re permanent, honey.
I love how you roll your eyes but can’t help smiling whenever I call you “honey.”
I love the smell of your perfume on my shirts.
I love the way you curl up against my body.
I love watching the sunset from the roof with you.
I love seeing your number appear on my cell phone.
I love the poems you wrote in junior high school.
I love how you fumble for words when you’re angry.
I love holding you tight when you ask me to.
I love knowing exactly how crazy I am about you.
I love sensing you beside me on long road trips.
I love the idea of growing old and forgetful together.
I love how skillfully you use a pair of scissors.
I love watching TV and shelling sunflower seeds with you.
I love your “Cousin Cephus and his pet raccoon Shirley.”
I love the mess I made of braiding your hair.
I love your ten fingers and love your ten toes.
I love your terrible puns: “Miró, Miró, on the wall.”
I love the “carpet angels” you make after I vacuum.
I love that little outfit you wore on my birthday.
I love the way chocolate makes your eyes light up.
I love hearing you try to defend Hall and Oates.
I love your compassionate heart—your big, sloppy, sentimental heart.
I love watching you sit and crochet while I’m doing the bills or clearing the photo banks.
I love those old yearbook pictures of you.
I love it when you watch me shave and laugh at the faces I make.
I love how, when we come home from a bar, you’ll hang the clothes you wore in the garage until the cigarette stink evaporates.
I love sitting outside on a blanket with you, my bare foot brushing against yours.
I love how embarrassing you find your middle name.
I love your Free Cell addiction.
I love how irritated you get at smiley face icons, or, as I know you love to call them, “emoticons.”
I love the way you’ll hold a new book up to your face and fan through the pages to inhale the scent.
I love wasting an afternoon tossing stones off the pier with you.
I love seeing your body turn into a mosaic through the frosted glass of the hotel shower.
I love the fact that you know all the lyrics to “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
I love it when you fall asleep while I’m driving, because it lets me feel like I’m protecting you.
I love the way you’ll call me in the middle of the day to apologize for the littlest things.
I love driving to the bluff and drinking cheap red wine out of paper cups with you.
I love how beautifully you sing when you think no one is listening.
I love it when the computer freezes up or we get stuck in a traffic jam and you lean back and pull out your old “Ahhh! This is the life!” routine.
I love the “bloop” sound you make whenever you drop something.
I love remembering the evening we sat on the roof at your parents’ and watched the sunset reflecting off the windows of that old church.
I love your silver chimneysweep charm, the one you wear around your neck for good luck.
I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun striking you through the philodendron leaves.
I love that game where you draw a picture on my back with your finger and I try to guess what it is.
I love those blue jeans with the sunflowers on the pockets, the ones that hug the curves of your waist.
I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns.
I love the joke you told at Eli and Abbey’s wedding reception.
I love how easily you cry when you’re happy.
I love your question marks that look like backwards s’s, your periods that look like bird’s beaks.
I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the ChapStick from your lips.
I love how you laugh with your mouth open wide, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do.
I love to think of you as that bored little girl designing adventures for herself, riding your sleeping bag down the staircase, or taking a running leap along the hallway and trying to flip the light switch in midair, or walking from your bedroom to the far side of the kitchen without stepping in the sunlight, or else you would die.
I love how your eyes grow wet whenever you talk about your grandfather.
I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail.
I love planning vacations with you.
I love how good you are to me when I’m not feeling well.
I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited or even heard of, that you use when you’re trying to sound Italian.
I love the bull story.
I love helping you shave that tricky spot behind your knees.
I love the way your hair fritzes out in all directions when you work up a sweat.
I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine.
I love that perfect little cluster of moles on your wrist.
I love the yellow tights you wear when you’re feeling—how you say?—sparky.
I love every—
I love how dark your hair gets after you wash it.
I love waiting for you in the airport at the bottom of the escalator.
I love the way you run your hands under the hot water a hundred times a day when it gets cold outside.
I love how you “dot all your t’s and cross all your i’s.”
I love my birthday present—thank you so much.
I love hearing you rise to someone’s defense, and twice in one night, too: Woody Allen and Neville Chamberlain.
I love watching you upend a whole bottle of water after you’ve exercised: that little bobber working in your throat, and the gasp you make after you finish swallowing, and the way you slam the bottle back down on the counter.
I love how cute you are when we’re watching basketball together and you pretend to care who’s winning.
I love your idea for a hard rock supergroup made up of the members of Europe, Asia, and America—“Pangaea.”
I love your cleansing rituals (but I love your dirtying rituals even more).
I love your morning breath.
I love the e-mails you send me in the middle of the day.
I love trying to coax you to pick out a restaurant.
I love the way you groan whenever adult human beings start talking about comic books.
I love your green dress and your loneliness and your matching green shoes.
I love how you have a foot cramp and you keep saying “Stop it, stop it, stop it” to yourself.
I love it that you’re walking down the sidewalk and now you’ve turned the corner and I can’t see you anymore because you’re gone.
I love your avocado and Swiss sandwiches.
I love the way your neck arches like a cat’s whenever you hear a car slowing down on the street outside our window.
I love the story of the Sticky Bandit—aka Mr. Splat.
I love your fascination with crop circles, but as landscape art, not UFO indentations or messages from the Circlemakers of the Beyond.
I love swipping your triggle gitch.
I love your Elvis impression—the worst Elvis impression I’ve ever heard, or ever will hear, in my entire life.
I love your thing for lips and hands—and the fact that, thank God, my own lips and hands received a passing grade.
I love the little meditative puffing noises you make when you’re exercising.
I love watching you dive into a swimming pool, the way your body wavers underneath the water, the way your legs frog open and closed, the way you breach the surface with your eyes shut good and hard.
I love feeling your hands reach behind me to adjust my collar when I’m wearing a shirt and tie.
I love the way, when we haven’t seen each other for a while, you’ll run to me with one of your patented spring-loaded hugs, your arms outstretched and then BAM!
I love the hard time you have with fractions.
I love the soft blue veins on your wrist.
I love the beautiful pink cushions of your lips.
I love hearing you sing old R&B songs when you don’t know I’m listening, love your bright little meadlowlark of a voice.
I love it when we finish having sex, and we don’t have anything to do, and I can just lie there twitching inside you for a while.
I love the way you’ll put a few spoonfuls of palak paneer on your plate, eat it, then put another few spoonfuls on your plate, eat it, and so on.
I would love to have a baby with you.
— July 28, 2023