There is a boy who loves me.

  There is a boy who loves me.

  His name is Ezra, and he is five years old.

  A few months ago he came running to me with a piece of paper and a pen hidden behind his back and asked me, “Sarah, how do you spell ‘Friends forever’?”

  Children trying to surprise someone are adorable in the utter clumsiness of their secrecy.

  I knew that if I spelled it out for him, as soon as I said the first letter he would run into the other room to write it slyly on the piece of paper before running back and asking me what came next. This process would have taken far more time and effort than it seemed to merit, so I grabbed a receipt out of my purse and wrote ‘Friends forever’ on the back. I handed him the receipt, telling him to copy it, and he scampered off to his bedroom to write it out in secrecy.

  As I had expected, about ten minutes later he presented me with a card he’d made. The front proclaimed his expectation that our friendship, gapped in age by nearly fifteen years, would last forever. Inside he’d drawn a picture of the two of us- I incredibly tall with somewhat triangular hair, he considerably shorter. There is the standard sun in the sky and flower growing near us, and also a dandelion seed floating above our heads.
  I have kept the card. I don’t keep every love letter that every child ever makes me, but this one I kept. The genuine, childlike love that he put into it makes it absolutely beautiful to me.

  And he kept something, too. His mother later told me that when she was tidying his room she found the receipt I’d given him, and when she went to throw it away he was horrified. “Mom!” he’d said, “You can’t throw that away, SARAH gave it to me! She wrote on it!”

  Ezra loves me unassumingly and whole-heartedly. He literally throws his small self into my arms to hug me, and he is certain of my love for him as well. He believes we will be friends for the rest of our lives, and I hope that we will. I hope I get to watch him grow up and become a teenager, and then a man. I hope I go to his wedding and meet his children and get to draw them pictures the way I do for him now.
  I love this child so much. In the three years that I have been his nanny, he has said many memorable things. He, his siblings, and I have had more fun than one could imagine could be contained in one neighborhood home and a large backyard. These children have become like brothers and sisters to me, hanging off of me and dancing with me. They run to me with their arguments, loose teeth, split lips, and fears of spiders and strange dogs.

  Ezra loves me with an innocent love that knows fully it is reciprocated. He loves me with everything that is within him, and knows that I love him and his siblings with all that is within me as well. To love like that is a hard thing, because it requires more trust than most of us credit one another with.

  Trust that the love is mutual, and that it is a two-way street stretching far into the distance until it blurs with the horizon, because it knows no end.
  That is how children love, and that sort of love is beautiful