Ana I Love You

A playful lettering piece that fuses the English phrase "I love you" with the Arabic أنا بحبك. Pauline built it around something she's noticed often in Lebanese culture: that it can feel easier to say I love you in English or French, that the phrase softens in translation. Saying أنا بحبك in Arabic doesn't soften the same way. In her language, she says, those words carry an honesty and an intensity that make them almost impossible to say without meaning them, every word landing with real emotional weight. The piece is built to show that even when someone reaches for the English phrase, the force of the Arabic version is still sitting underneath it. The lettering becomes a meeting point between the two languages, proof, in her reading, that the feeling stays stronger in Arabic even when it's said in English. Around the lettering she placed flowers, coffee, olives, the traditional tarboush (red hat), and hearts, a small landscape of memory built out of the things that keep home close.