The day we started talking to each other, I wonder if the stars looked down at us and thought: finally. they met.

I was the boy who was never in love, but in love with computers, questions, science and numbers. I hadn’t looked at any girl, I was interested in none. friends with everyone, attached to none. not because I was too far to reach, but because I had never seen my type, never met someone I was genuinely hungry to know. my heart was a library no one had ever checked a book out of. I was kind to all of them, I thought I had learned the skill of love through action, through showing up, through the quiet gestures. but the feeling itself, the raw unnamed thing in the chest, I couldn’t find it. I thought maybe it just wasn’t mine to have.

And then there was her. strong and kind at the same time, which is the rarest combination this world produces. tough in a way that made men uncomfortable, because their games had no grip on her, their usual tricks slid right off. she had no male friends. she carried her convictions like armor, voted with her values, stood for women the way people stand for things they actually believe in and not just perform. they thought she was hard. they were wrong. underneath all that certainty she was soft, feminine, playful, a little crazy in the most alive sense of the word. it was these contradictions that were already writing the story before we even knew there was one.

And then we met. and we felt it instantly, that strange and slightly terrifying recognition, the feeling that says there is no way this person is real. there is no way such a person exists. and yet there she was. and there I was. and the stars, I imagine, exhaled.

I remember clearly the day we met. it is pressed into my memory like a flower between pages, preserved and unchanged. of all the things I carry, that day is my favorite. the day I met you.