The very best

 Help. I’m desperately in love with my best friend. I hate it when people say that, but it’s true. It’s been a long year of love and loss, panic and pandemic and if nothing else I’ve gained conviction. 

I used to play pretend- imagining futures for myself with different princes. I would look at shiny things and sigh at idealized storybook chiffon. I don’t know how to describe this reality I’ve found myself in. Used to be I would use words like “stark” and “cold” and capitalize things like The Real World for extra emphasis. I never saw the beauty in the ordinary. Tonight I said “I won’t be mad if you’re not able to make it, it’s out of your control” and it meant it. It wasn’t a simper or a noble self sacrifice, but the true fact that if the world prevents this moment we still have a lifetime. 

Not a lifetime of fairy tales, but of reality. Finances and kids and all the things no one ever wanted to talk about before. It was all happily ever, but no after. I don’t want to live in happily ever. I want to live here. I want the career decisions and the grad school, the meal prep and the small budget barbecue. I want our families and I don’t care about much else (except apparently I care a lot about a simple clear stone. Who knew?) 

You’ve told me about your moments of failure, and I’ve told you mine. You’ve been my champion even when you’re cursing my monstrous Microsoft habits. We spend a weekend adventuring and then sinking into sleep with your fingers tangled in my hair. But I am me. When I leave, I don’t plummet into depression. I have friends (who dearly love you, even after all I had ever told them) and a career and plenty of people who apparently look up to me. 

Today the man who failed me once told me I had conviction. He praised me for not backing down when asked difficult questions. It’s a compliment in an academic setting, sure, but it’s also a greater truth that I’ve begun to acknowledge in myself. I have grown and changed more in this last year than I could have believed. I am a whole person, and it is not because someone gave me something I didn’t already have. 

I’m so fucking in love with you, but I’m in love with me too. That’s what makes all this so fantastic. There’s never been a moment where I have doubted your wish for me to be my own human. Looking back, I want to laugh and cry and run screaming into the ocean. Rom coms can keep their fairy tales. This is better.