Nadia

I have tried to say this to your face maybe a dozen times and my throat closes every single time, so I am doing it the coward's way, in writing, where you can't watch me malfunction.

You know how you found me. Running on fumes and pretending it was a personality. I had quietly decided a few things about myself, mostly that I was fine on my own and probably better off that way. Then you sat down next to me at a wedding neither of us wanted to be at and asked me a real question, an actual one, not a polite one, and then you waited for the actual answer. Nobody had done that in a long time. I think I fell in somewhere around the fourth second and spent the next year being very cool about it.

Here is the truth I've been sitting on like a stone. You didn't fix me, and I want to be clear, I don't think I was broken, but you stood next to me while I worked out that I wasn't. That is a bigger thing. That might be the biggest thing anyone has done for me.

I'm in this. All the way to the bottom of it. Whatever the long version of us turns out to be, that's the one I want.

I don't know when I'll be brave enough to put this in your hands. Maybe today. Maybe I leave it somewhere you'll find it and pretend I don't know how it got there. Either way it now exists outside my head, and after thirty-six years of saying nothing, that is the most I have ever managed.