The Letter I Keep Meaning To Write You

I have started this letter a hundred times.

1. In my head, mostly.
2. In the shower.
3. On the drive to work when a song comes on that sounds exactly like what being with you feels like.
4. I have composed entire paragraphs in the dark at two in the morning while you slept next to me completely unaware that I was lying there overwhelmed by how much I love you.

And every time I try to write it down, the words come out smaller than the feeling.

But I am going to try anyway.

Because you deserve to know this. Not assumed. Not implied. Actually said, in actual words, where you can come back and read it on the days you forget.

I want to tell you what you did to my life. Not in the dramatic way. Not the way love stories get told in movies where everything is heightened and significant and perfectly lit.

In the real way. The quiet, ordinary, completely unremarkable way that turns out to be the most profound thing that has ever happened to me.

You made my life feel like mine. I did not always feel that way.

Before you, I spent a lot of time performing a version of myself that I thought people needed me to be. Smaller in some rooms. Louder in others. Always slightly edited. Always with one eye on how I was landing, whether I was too much or not enough, whether the real version of me was something another person could actually stay for.

And then you came along and just… stayed.

Not because I was performing well. Not because I had it all together. You stayed on the days I was difficult and the weeks I was distant and through the version of me that wakes up anxious for no reason and cannot always explain why. You stayed and you did not make me feel like staying was a sacrifice.

Do you have any idea what that did to me?

I want to tell you about the specific things. Because I think we spend so much time inside the feeling that we forget to name the details. And the details are everything.

The way you remember things I mentioned once and thought you were not listening to. The way you look at me sometimes across a room full of people like I am the only interesting thing in it. The way you defend me before I even know I needed defending. The way you show up, not just for the big things, but for the Tuesday things, the nothing is wrong but everything feels heavy things, the I just need you to sit with me things.

The way you make ordinary feel like enough.

I used to think I needed a grand life to be happy. Big moments. Significant events. Things worth photographing and remembering and telling people about. And I have had some of those with you and they have been beautiful.

But the thing I did not expect, the thing I could not have predicted before you, is that the moments I will carry longest are the ones nobody else would consider remarkable.

1. That Sunday we did not leave the house.
2. The road trip where everything went wrong and we laughed about all of it.
3. The evening you made dinner and it was terrible and we ordered takeout instead and I remember thinking I have never been this happy in my life.

Those moments. The ones that will never make it into a highlight reel but that I would choose over anything else I have ever experienced.

You gave me those.

I need you to know something about the scared parts too.

Because I would not be telling you the whole truth if I only told you the beautiful parts.

Loving you has made me brave in ways I did not ask to be brave. When you love someone this much, you are also walking around with the full knowledge of what losing them would cost you. I carry that sometimes. Not as a shadow over what we have. Just as a quiet awareness that this matters. That you matter. That what we are building together is the most important thing I have ever been a part of.

And on the days that awareness feels heavy, I come back to this.

You chose me. Deliberately. On purpose. Not in spite of the complicated parts of me but somehow, impossibly, including them. And I chose you. With everything I know about you, with full sight of your flaws and your fears and the ways you are still figuring yourself out, I chose you and I would choose you again without hesitation.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

I do not know what the future looks like in any specific detail and honestly I have stopped needing to.

Because the only thing I actually need to know about the future is that you are in it. That we will navigate whatever it brings the way we have navigated everything so far. Not perfectly. Not without friction. But together, and honestly, and with the kind of love that does not flinch when things get hard.

I want to grow with you. Not just older. Actually grow. I want us to be different in ten years because we chose each other well. I want to look back at this version of us with the same tenderness that I hope our future selves will look back on right now.

I want all of it. The good years and the hard ones and the boring ones and the ones that surprise us both.

As long as it is with you.

So, this is the letter I keep meaning to write you.

It is still smaller than the feeling. It will always be smaller than the feeling. But I hope it is enough to tell you what I perhaps do not say as often as I should.

You are my favourite thing, not my favourite person, though you are that too. My favourite thing. The best part of my days and the reason my ordinary life feels extraordinary and the single greatest evidence I have that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

• Thank you for staying.
• Thank you for seeing me.
• Thank you for making me feel, for the first time in my life, like being fully myself was not just acceptable but was the whole point.

I love you more than this letter and more than I will probably ever fully say.

But I am going to spend the rest of my life trying.

If this letter said something you have been carrying quietly, send it to your person. You do not need to add anything. Just let them read it. Some things land better when someone else finds the words.

Patricia Monroe