To the person I've loved all these years,
Is it weird to say I miss you? Is it weird to say my heart hurts when I'm without you? Is it weird to say that I can't stop thinking about you? We once knew each other well, but the more pages I turn, the more I find the book changing. In the end, will I even know it at all? Perhaps it was my mistake falling in love with you. It took me a while to realize it, but the feeling was exhilarating in its beginning. The feeling of loving someone for the first time and being so absolutely enveloped in nothing but them has a strange, but nice feeling. Personally I think it's almost like masochism. It feels like you've been stabbed in the heart, but it also feels like flowers are blooming from the same chasm.
I'm not quite sure what made me fall in love with you in the first place. At some point, I just happened to find my eyes wandering to wherever you were. I found myself missing you every vacation. I found myself wishing I was in somewhere even as hellish as school just so I could meet you. I even found myself dreaming of you. They were always the same dream, over and over again: your bright smile as we made eye contact, the blush on your cheeks as we stayed in that one moment, the sweet melody that enveloped this one singular second that seemed to have lasted an eternity. And then I would wake up. Even though it was just a dream, the rush of it made my heart pound and I wouldn't be able to go back to sleep. Whenever I thought about you, I found myself beaming uncontrollably.
I'm sorry if I ended up being annoying or creepy or anything else that displeasured you. The more I fell in love, the more I felt myself paying attention to you. I loved the way your eyes lit up with flecks of gold every time you talked about your favorite musical. I loved the smile on your face whenever you told us jokes or talked about immature things, like the children we were. I loved the belittling smirk you always wore whenever we bickered until neither of us could figure out a comeback and would immediately get flustered. Everything about you—I loved all of it.
One of my favorite lyrics is "Even the sorrow of that day, even the pain, together with you, I loved it all." Though it's a song about death, the bitter warmth that emanates from such a melody resounds deeply within me and I'm left with a stolen memory. The more I think about it, the more I feel the same. Despite the pain that companions longing and desire, the immense feeling of happiness surely outweighs the negative feelings that love provides. In the end, this sickness known as "first love" really was all worth it.
And so I must end it on a note that I can be proud of. You truly were my first love. But even if you never loved me, even a little, that's okay. The dead fertilizes and makes way for new beginnings to grow, like the way flowers bloom amongst the corpses of what had once been alive. If I can end my first love proudly, then I know that I truly will have loved all of it. And so I've approached the last sentence in this letter, the only really important one anyway.
I love you.
