Thank you for writing the letter. not only for writing it, but for sending it, and for sharing what you felt yesterday. I didn’t feel frustrated when I read it, no, it was a relief. it was the relief of hearing you, of knowing you chose to speak instead of disappear into yourself. and I want you to know that I will always love receiving anything from you over receiving your silence. your silence and your distance can tear me apart in ways I don’t have words for yet.

The letter didn’t bother me. it reminded me. it reminded me of us, of what we keep choosing to do with the hard things. and I am really thankful for that. for the way we always set everything aside because we love each other, because we feel each other, we know it even in the darkest nights. even in the small tensions we keep finding our way back to a middle ground, we keep ascending toward each other when everything else pulls us down.

I know your letters, I know where they come from. they are not from a place of making me feel guilt, or pulling me back to the bad days, or asking me to revisit parts of my life I have been working hard to leave behind. of course you wouldn’t do that to me. they come from a place of not letting the small black dots accumulate, of keeping our chests light instead of heavy, of keeping our hearts toward each other clean and honest and open.

And I love you, North, for memorizing this lesson so well. I am proud of you, genuinely proud, that even in a hard moment, even when you were upset and carrying something difficult, you chose to talk. you didn’t swallow it. you didn’t tell yourself it is just my emotions, I will deal with it alone, I will forget it eventually. because the mind forgets, but the heart never does. and the more you hid, the more distance grew between us. I am proud that again and again you choose to say it out loud, even when it is hard, even when it might hurt, because we can risk a hard conversation between us, we can risk confronting each other with the truth, rather than ever risking our love.

That is what we have been doing. do you remember? before the seventh of October we were building something real without fully knowing it. we followed what our hearts said even when it was frightening, we reopened wounds, we walked into hard conversations we didn’t know how to finish, we took roads that hurt because we could not imagine a future where we were not together. that hasn’t changed. that is what sets us apart from everything I have ever known.

I am so proud of what you have done. of what we have done. to save us. to save our love. I love you, darling.