"Between friends, unspoken feelings can feel like a fragile thread pulled taut; one denies its existence while the other hides behind its delicate weave, both yearning for the courage to unravel what lies beneath."
Ian and Julian, long-time best fri...
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Something lingers at the edge of my mind. A whisper, a half-formed thought, something just out of reach. It unsettles me in the quiet moments, in the spaces between one breath and the next.
It has been a year.
I still love him.
Despite everything. Despite his impossible, his maddening whims, infuriating, too-muchness. Despite the way he moves through life like a storm that never quite passes.
I love him, and I don't know how to stop.
A year since we left. A year since Julian pressed the idea into my hands like an offering, like a promise—that college could wait, that the world was vast and waiting, that we were meant to spill ourselves into it before letting it shrink to lecture halls and deadlines. And somehow, he was right. We unraveled across continents, stretched ourselves thin over cities, deserts, oceans, mountaintops. We became creatures of motion, untethered, wild, belonging to nowhere and everywhere at once.
We began in Rome, where history hums beneath your feet and time moves like honey. Mornings were drowsy affairs—espresso balanced on wrought-iron tables, the scent of bread and sun-warmed stone thick in the air. Evenings belonged to winding alleys and golden-lit piazzas, to pasta so good it rewired my understanding of hunger. Julian thrived in it, in the slowness, the excess—leaning against fountains, insisting we sit there just to watch the light ripple across the water like liquid gold.
Then Greece, where the air smelled like salt and sun-bleached stone, where the sea stretched so blue it seemed unreal. We swam until our bodies ached, dove into water so clear I could see the world flicker beneath me—fish darting, sunlight fracturing in ribbons. The nights blurred into something feverish, something ancient, like the ruins had not yet learned how to sleep. We drank too much, danced on rooftops, let the sky swallow us whole.
Southeast Asia—where the heat clung like another skin, thick and relentless. Julian moved through it like he belonged, slipping between market stalls, pressing food into my hands with a knowing look. Everything burned—sweet, smoky, electric on the tongue. We rode motorbikes through cities that never seemed to pause, stayed in wooden bungalows where geckos clung to the ceilings, hiked through jungles where the world folded in green and silence.
In South America, I stopped thinking about what came next. Maybe it was the Andes, rising like something eternal, or Patagonia, where the wind carried the sharp scent of untouched earth. Buenos Aires pulled us in for longer than we planned. Julian loved the tango bars—not to dance, but to watch, transfixed, as if he could feel the music in his bones. I loved the bookshops, the dust-soft pages, the people who still sat with paperbacks in their hands, underlining words like they held the weight of prophecy.
There were places I never thought I'd see—Morocco, where the air spun with the scent of spice and sun-warmed leather, where we wandered the medinas and let ourselves be lost. Japan, where Kyoto's temples stood hushed beneath the weight of snowfall, and the steam from bowls of ramen curled into the winter air. Iceland, where we bathed in hot springs as the cold bit at our skin, where the sky bruised itself with the slow dance of the northern lights. I loved it the most.
