december 25, 2019
dear lukas flynn,
i don’t have a fancy christmas card for you this year. some obnoxious glitter filled sentimental thing to be stashed away with all the others that i have given you over the years. do you even keep them? a part of me hopes not. a part of me hopes you’ve destroyed the evidence of our wasted youth. but there’s another part of me that hopes you saved them too. a chronicle of where we’ve been and how far we’ve come.
i can fill an entire bookcase of all the memories that i have shared with you. you don’t need me to tell you that you always have been and always will be the most important person in my life. you are the anchor that grounds me. you are my safe harbor in the storm. you are my partner in crime. you are my better half.
but what i have never been able to share with you is how much more you have been to me for so long now. there are nights when you are fast asleep, lost in your dreams, when i want to share all this with you. to unburden myself and tell you how i feel. to whisper these words in hopes that they saturate your dreams and eventually infiltrate your waking thoughts. but i have never been very forthcoming with my own emotions and what better gift than to finally open up and share them with you now.
i can’t remember when my feelings towards you shifted. i only know that what i felt was no longer entirely platonic. i suppose it was bound to eventually happen. we have always been so intertwined in each other’s lives that one of us would inevitably consider the possibility of something more. looking back on it, i think there was always a part of me that always had the inclination towards that something more.
confession: the night we lost our virginity to each other, i called my grams. it was nothing unusual. just a phone call to check in. she immediately knew something had happened. apparently there was something she could sense in the tone of my voice. she asked me if everything was fine between the two of us, which completely caught me off guard. and the words just fell out of my mouth. "we had sex." she laughed. "of course you did, allie cat. that boy is the other half of your heart."
i can still hear her voice saying those words. they are some of the last words she said to me too.
but i guess there has been a part of me that has always known it was true. even those rare moments when there were other people in our lives, i have never doubted it. but i have never wanted to pressure you. i have wanted nothing but your happiness, even if it meant you finding it with someone else instead of me.
i have loved you for years, lukas. not just years. decades. i have watched and waited for my turn. i have buried my feelings to the point where sometimes i have to remind myself that i don’t have to anymore.
in books and movies, the transition from best friends to lovers is always so seamless. as though something just clicks in two people and they wake up knowing exactly how to navigate the changes that the shift in relationship brings. you know i have never been well versed in relationships. i know that this won’t be easy. nothing worth it ever is. we will have our ups and downs. we won’t always communicate to the best of our ability. we’ll argue. we’ll even fight. but at the end of the day, you are absolutely right. what matters is that we do this together.
so keep this as a reminder. a promise. no matter where this road leads us, no matter where this journey takes us, i am so lucky to be on it with you. thank you for being the other half of my heart.
i love you.
xo,
alexis ivy