I Love You So Much

So in 2004, I took a trip to New York City with somebody that I’d just started seeing. I’d recently moved to Austin and had fallen in love with it and with her and on the last day of our trip, we were walking around the Chelsea neighborhood and we turned the corner into an alley and on a brick wall in yellow cursive was spray painted, “I love you so much.” Immediately I just felt like this amazing chance encounter in this giant city, and she took my picture. I’m 29 in a fuzzy cap I just bought off the street, staying in a nice hotel for the first time in my entire life with someone who’s charming and funny and likes music and poetry and everything felt full of magic and possibility.
I thought about this tag a lot in the coming years. I even put it on the garage outside my studio. I did my own version of I Love You So Much, and I thought about where I would put this giant love note to my now partner who would immediately get the reference from our trip. So in 2010, six years after the trip, it occurred to me, “Oh, the coffee shop.” So, I grabbed a can of red spray paint and I drove down to the coffee shop, and I should say at this point, this is not a random coffee shop. My girlfriend owned this coffee shop. And I was the painter of the coffee shop. I painted this wall green so many times because it got tagged constantly. So I just figured I’d paint it one more time, but at least she would drive down the street and see this giant love note for her.
She had helped me become more spontaneous and creative. She had this real approach the shrimp bowl like you own it mentality. Although she did often, in fact, own the shrimp bowl, which makes it easier. I knew at least she wouldn’t be mad that I’d done it. And all I had really thought, as far as I thought was like, “Oh, she’s going to drive down the street on the way home and see it and it’s going to be amazing. She’s going to laugh, ha ha ha, and then I’ll paint over it.” But that’s not what happened. She loved it and so did everybody else.
I couldn’t have predicted what happened, which was immediately that day that I spray painted I Love You So Much on the wall, people started taking their picture outside of it. People came for awkward first dates, for bridal showers, engagement photos, and pet birthdays. I loved this time, just watching people, their faces light up the way that I imagined mine did in Chelsea that day in that alley. I love that picture.
So, that’s as far as I’d got was that she’s going to go and smile and that’s it. And people started taking pictures immediately. Sorry, I have some anxiety and I blank out.

You got this.

I know. I got it, I got it, I got it, I got it. Don’t worry. I’m good. Nobody panic. It’s going to be fine.
So, people started coming, taking pictures, never one to miss the low-hanging fruit, my ex, or my partner at the time started making merchandise with, I Love You So Much written on it that she would sell out of the coffee shop. So T-shirts, mugs, and…
Oh, God, I’m so sorry, you guys.

Colors.

Colors, the colors, the colors. I have a color-coded thing because of my anxiety that I like. Here. It’s blue. We’re on the blue one now, it’s all good. We’re on the blue. So she made the merchandise. I turned down a bunch of interviews at the time because I just didn’t want to step on anybody’s experience of the I Love You So Much sign because people were creating their own sort of stories for it and I didn’t want to step all over that.
And that was an easy kind of letting go. It wouldn’t always be so easy. In the end of 2012, my partner and I broke up after eight years, and I will just tell you, instead of telling you the next 14 years of failed attempts to get royalties, I’m just going to say three things.
One, although promised for years that I would have a percentage of both the coffee shop and a percentage of royalties, neither the original owner or the management company or their now corporate owners have ever paid me a dime in royalties. Two, yes, I have tried to get royalties. I got an attorney. We asked for 10%. They said no. I don’t have the money to fight an international corporation over a copyright. Three, all I’ve wanted from basically the very beginning was just to be able to let go of this, right? This promise of future money to a starving artist is compelling. And so it kind of kept me on the hook. And also, I see my handwriting everywhere, which has been a little bit difficult for me. I didn’t do this to make money, but the fact that other people are making money kind of gets at me a little bit, even though I wish that it didn’t.
I was talking to my friend… Well, I can understand. So we broke up, right? We have different ambitions, priorities. I totally get that. But I couldn’t understand why she was doing everything in her power to keep me from seeing profit off of this. And then this question, did she ever love me in the first place?
I was talking to my friend, Sean, about this a couple of weeks ago and I was like, “How do you let go? How do you know you’ve done all that you can do, right?” I’ve had a tendency in my life just to say, “Screw it. Who cares? Dirty money. Don’t need it.” But I felt like I owed it to myself to at least try to be compensated for this thing that I’d made. So, how do you know when you’ve done all that you can do? And she reminded me that letting go is a process and that it’s way better than it was like say 10 years ago or even five years ago, and that maybe this talk is part of that process. And it’s true, having to think about questions like, who do I want to be? What do I value? What’s important to me? Has just reaffirmed what I’ve already known about myself, which is it’s peace of mind, community, friendships, and it isn’t money. It never was.
So, I am in grad school right now. I’m finishing my Master’s degree in Social Work at UT. Thank you. I still make music and art and I am privileged and lucky in a million, million ways. I have great friends, great community, amazing baseball team that I’m on, Playboys, Texas. So, this is some art that I’ve made, but I feel like what I lost track of in all this fight with my ex over money is the fact that I’ve made something that’s meaningful for people. You might have a story about the I Love You So Much sign, right? It’s meant something to people and no one can take that from me.
So, I still think a lot about the person who wrote that I Love You So Much in that alley in Chelsea. I wonder who they are, who they wrote it for, what is or was their story. All I did was I wrote a love note on a wall that was a callback to another love note on a wall that may have been a callback to another love note. Who knows? When I was talking to my friend, Sean, about all this, some lyrics of hers popped into my head and resonated with me. She sings, “All of my old world and all the things in it are hard to find, like they ever were mine.” And that’s kind of comforting to me because at the end of the day, and from the very beginning, the I Love You So Much sign, it’s always just kind of been Austin’s. Thank you all.