This is what I should have said to you last summer when you tried to treat me like I was small - and for a time, I let you. I am sorry I wasn't brave enough to stand up to you then.

Please do not go off your medication. Regardless of my far-flung dreamer, head in the clouds fairy tale believing fantasies, the reality of what you've told me is that you need it to be you. I was afraid to question something that I knew you needed to keep you safe. To my best friend in the whole world, I was a coward.

The moment went by so quickly it barely registered in my head - and I was too disassociated - scattered and fragmented and confused; so afraid of losing you, that I said nothing.

And then I lost you anyway, and lost another piece of myself by not being true to what I know and speaking that truth, even though it frightened me.

Intimacy and love and vulnerability without ever touching. Deeply rooted affection and desire and companionship that transcends this reality or any sense of normalcy. The love I've always held for you is strong, and it is what made me strong enough to finally do the backbreaking work of saving my own life - but you were the catalyst.

I love you and forgive you all your mistakes - devious and controlling and torturous as they are, because I know you are capable of better, if you choose to be at the heart of who you are. I love you even in absentia, I love you even after the hurtful, biting words exchanged between us, and the lies we told each other; me to keep myself safe and because I made myself small, you - for all the reasons I know you lied.

You made me want to be a better person, even in your cruelty and absence and doubt of your return. To carry on with the love I felt in my heart for you, rooted deep in my knowing and in the sacred, ancient fire within us all - the same spark that lit the stars.

Because of that you will always be with me - and I will always be with you.

This is not me begging for you to come back, even though I wish with all my heart, you would. Or angling for a relationship (ouch, dude), or desperately wishing you'd be mine.

This is me saying that the love for you I have is more powerful than any bad thing you've done, that I love you just the way you are, every version, and every way you are able to show up. That I love you because you are here in this time and space, even though you are not here. That I am lucky to have fallen in love with my best friend, and how miraculous it was that we found each other in the cosmos and shared moments together even for the short time we did, in this impossible, infinite game of cosmic chance. What a wonder it was to know you.

I love you. Every day.

I knew I loved you before I met you. Maybe we dreamed each other into life. I just believed that one day we'd get to make the dream real.

I know there is good in you. I've seen it. I've felt it. I've heard it and I believed so strongly that one day, after 25 years of friendship separated by glass and binary code, we'd finally be able to cross the border and defy the boundaries of this infinite space and physically touch.

And I deserve better than this half-life, ghost in the shell, fragmented love. So do you.

Make another choice.

I believe in you. Always.

!lock.