DEP Relationships

The Word for “I Love You” in My Language Hides Another Word Inside It

A story of two worlds — the sun and the moon

Love does not mean disappearing into each other. It means remaining yourself and still choosing each other. AI-generated illustration created by the author.

I was just past thirty when I met him. But long before that, I had already risen from my own ashes more than once.

In my youth, I lived like a phoenix. Whenever I hit something I couldn’t get past, I would burn down in that world and be born again in another — a first marriage, two children, a career, and so on. I lived many lives that way. And despite all the pain, I never regretted any of it, because I always came out the other side having won.

I was twenty-five when I met Hades himself, and my son Nikoloz and I won the fight between life and death together. I fought alone. I followed my intuition. I felt, in my body, everything I was supposed to do. I set myself against the world often — and I won. Those victories gave me faith. They made me stronger.

So by the time he walked into my life, I knew exactly who I was.

To most people, he seemed cold, cynical, a little imperious — a strategist, a man tangled up in the machinery of politics. People kept their distance from him. He made them uneasy. They saw only the mask of the cynic. I watched him from the start with a strange curiosity, because I thought I saw something else.

He wrote me, maybe, two hundred messages a day. It would start with an ordinary hello, the news of the country, and then he’d tell me what he was doing, how he saw it — and I’d tell him what I was doing, how I saw it. He’s a philosopher, and I am mad about philosophy, and he was forever drawing lines between what was happening around us and what lived inside the old philosophical texts.

Behind the rigid mask I found a thinker, a man of unexpected depth, who wanted to be seen. I don’t know if that was the truth about him or only my version of it. But it was what I saw, what I felt. To me, he became a man who, beneath all that hardness and certainty, carried a world of color — and who opened his heart to me two hundred times a day. That is when I first felt chosen. Because this was his real face, the one he showed no one else.

And still, we were two completely different creatures. He was thirteen years older, pragmatic, never reaching for emotion; he explained everything through structure. I was raw feeling, a girl who erupted like a volcano, who saw the world through what she felt. We argued, often. And like anyone in love, because he was the “great man,” I sometimes wondered: maybe I’m missing something, maybe my way of seeing is exaggerated. But I never surrendered. I couldn’t perceive the world any other way.

Then came the storm. Whole armies of people who did not want us together began to gather against us. People with power could make our lives difficult, and that war began too. We didn’t yield — though it sometimes set off storms inside our own relationship. I took up the role of Joan of Arc and declared war on the world. He went on with his cold-blooded strategy.

I was a romantic then. I thought we were supposed to have one vision, one strategy. I was waiting for a fairy tale: my prince should ride out, furious, onto the battlefield, and bring down the empire of evil. Instead, he told me — there’s no point now, you can’t act on impulse. I raged. But something strange kept happening: these differences, these enormous fights, never created the conditions in which two people are supposed to come apart. The opposite — every confrontation pulled me closer. Something was quietly weaving threads between us, and at the time, we barely noticed.

And then came that morning.

We were on the balcony, mid-argument, the usual kind. He said: “That’s your opinion. Do as you think.” The words landed in me like a blade. What do you mean, as I think? And where are you in all this? That day, something inside me fell like Carthage.

I thought about it for a long time. I was furious, hurt. But it was inside that thinking that something opened. I turned the word over and found the truth hiding inside it.

In my language, the word for I love you — mikvarkhar — has another word folded inside it: var. I am.

I had said that word a thousand times. That morning, for the first time, I heard what lived inside it.

I am. And you are.

He probably never thought twice about what he’d said. But for me, a door swung open.

From that day, I began to draw my own borders, and his. Two stories, two histories, two completely separate worlds — and between them a third, ours, far stronger than either alone. That day, the Zeus who ruled Olympus alone collapsed, and a second one was born: a female Zeus. The great Gigi Tevzadze now stood on the mountain beside the great Nini.

After that, when people said to me, “You are Gigi Tevzadze’s wife,” I would answer: Gigi Tevzadze is my husband. And I am Nini Chachia.

That was when it was time to give up the life of the phoenix. The way out was no longer to find a new current and dive in; it was to find myself inside this one. And it didn’t go one way only. I don’t know how he sees this world even now, but I feel that, in building our shared world, he too, learned emotion. Today, the word I love you is part of his everyday — and in the second decade of our life together, it still gives me the same shiver I felt the very first time.

Professionally, I always knew these processes — the theories, the stages, the explanations. But between knowing and living, there is sometimes an entire universe. What I had read in books, I lived out for myself on our balcony, on one ordinary morning.

Those two hundred messages were probably the stage we call the euphoria of falling in love. Then came the great arguments, the disappointments, and the discovery that we were two, and not one. And that morning on the balcony stayed with me as the moment I first understood — love does not mean dissolving into each other.

You can know the theory. But when it touches your own heart, you learn everything again from the beginning.

We still build entirely different worlds. But these two worlds hold each other up — not dependent on one another, exactly, and yet the invisible threads of attraction between them only make it more interesting.

My romanticism, my love of fairy tales, never went anywhere — so I still laugh when I think that maybe the world wanted it this way, and threw us at each other on purpose. I was born on June 21st, the brightest day of the year. He was born the very next day, June 22nd, when the sun has already begun to wane. Light and dark, back to back. And they met each other exactly where day gives way to night. That is how our two days made one world.

Our birthdays are coming soon. I love these two days more than any others. That is why, today, I tapped on my keyboard and let one drop of our love story fall into the eternity of the digital ocean.

I am grateful to the universe for carrying me through these storms of love, and for letting me find what every person, in their own way, is looking for.

Gigi — thank you for being in my life. With your help, I found the portal that opens onto the endless road of love.

And know this — mikvarkhar.

You are my love. You are my I am.

Yours, N.

Libby Shively McAvoy at DEP Relationships Column

✍ — Edited and Published by Dr. Gabriella Korosi, at Dancing Elephants Press. Click here for submission guidelines.