you saw me before I did ('hey love...' explanation)

There is a particular kind of love that does not announce itself cleanly. You only understand what it was trying to tell you in retrospect, when the distance finally gives you enough room to see the shape of it.

This is that story. Or the beginning of one, then again rather the middle. This is somewhat an explanation of my poem 'hey. love, you rearranged my world'.

I. The Name

He told me I reminded him of Sophie. He said it like it was obvious.

I did not fully understand what he meant. I nodded most likely, cheesed hard. I filed that comment away somewhere in my mind and went on growing into the designer I was becoming at the time.

Then it was over. And somewhere in the strange, quiet aftermath, I finally watched Howl's Moving Castle with Leah and Jess. And I sat there and understood everything at once.

"Sophie spends most of the film unable to see her own worth. She is cursed into a smaller version of herself. And yet she is the one who saves everyone."

Not through power nor cleverness. Through a kind of stubborn, unglamorous, quiet extraordinary love that transforms everything it touches without ever meaning to. She does not know she has magic. That is the curse — not that she became old, but that she believed it.

II. What He Wrote

Before I understood any of this, he had already tried to tell me. In a letter written on a Wednesday, — he wrote:

"You're so special. I hope you see it every time you look in the mirror."

And later, on butterfly stationery, in handwriting pressed hard into the page like urgency made visible:

"You see me for who I am, good and bad, and choose to help. You don't run from any part of me."

That is Howl writing to Sophie. A man who is brilliant and terrified in equal measure. A man who knows, on some level, that the person in front of him sees him more clearly than he sees himself — and that this is both the thing he wants most and the thing that undoes him. (read ‘Love: The Only Exception’)

I have no idea what to do. I'm terrified. Please don't hate me.

Howl, word for word.

What I did not understand then is that his terror had a shape. That there are people who can hold two things at once and call it complexity. That I'm terrified can be true and also not be the whole truth. A very honest liar.

III. The Poem

Years later I wrote a poem. I did not plan it as a 'Howl's Moving Castle' poem. The words arrived the way poems do — sideways, in pieces, pulled out of something I had been carrying quietly for a long time.

But when I read it back, it was him. All of it.

It opens with reaching across distance:

hey there love

it's been a while since we've spoken

I hope all is well and your spirit isn't broken...

...in my absence away from you I've learned the hard way

being everywhere but where my feet are

I think of you and it grounds me

And then, the apology that never quite found the words for while it was happening:

I am sorry I could not step up and grow up when you needed me as I needed you

cowardice before your greatness, how embarrassing

karma comes around and I have to eat my repercussions

death before dishonor so I went to the tree

I think the poem also had to be generous because the love was real even if it was incomplete. Both things are true. The tenderness and withholding was real. I am not interested in flattening either one.

and I should have told you daily

how absolutely glorious and ravishing and enthralling you are

but that is the least interesting thing about you

it's the way you light up with a new idea and you're able to pull it

out of your head and into your hands

you perform alchemy

In the film, Howl is literally an alchemist. But more than that — Sophie transforms a decaying, chaotic castle into something that feels like home. Through touch and presence. It is a real love that does not require the other person to be fixed first.

And then there is this:

you have cleared all illusions

thank you

with this and the ring —

I can't believe you have the ring —

and more I know you are real

even in my times of disbelief when I'm dead wrong

I think of you and there...

IV. The Ring

In Howl's Moving Castle, Howl gives Sophie his ring. It is an act of protection. A tether. A way of saying: if you are ever lost, this will bring you back to me.

I own a ring from the film. It was given to me as a gift before I had ever met him. Before any of this began and I had any reason to understand what it meant.I wore it without knowing what it was. And then I met someone who looked at me and saw Sophie. Life has a funny way of showing you yourself. The ring arrived before he did. Which means something was already moving toward me before I had language for it.

I do not know what to do with that. I am not sure I am supposed to do anything with it. Some things are not problems to be solved — they are just true, and you carry them.

V. What Sophie Knows Now

Sophie lifts her own curse. Not because Howl saves her — though he tries tenderly and imperfectly. She lifts it herself, by finally acting from her own power. By loving without waiting to be certain and stepping into the story she had been in all along.

The poem ends like this:

maybe it's time to pick up the pen

and not write in black but blue

and I know you'll write something special

and rearrange your world

the way you do

Sophie does not wait for Howl to be ready before she becomes herself. The magic was never contingent on him. It was always hers. He was right about what he saw. I am starting to see what he saw too.