After you left my room tonight, I sat there on my bed for like 30 minutes and just thought about how captivating you are. I thought about how  hard it is for me to even associate the memories I have of myself as real before you were in them. How I forget all the time that I wasn’t the one to hold you when you were first born, or tuck you in when you were little, or see your first steps. 

I think it’s because to me, it does feel like I’ve watched you from the beginning. When you first entered my life you were just like a newborn. You just showed up with a big smile on your face and looked at everything around you like it was the first time. You were clumsy and unfamiliar with the world as it really was. You had these tiny pieces of a real personality but you had learned to mimic those around you in order to feel safe and accepted. You made alot of noise, but you didn’t really know how to communicate. You were VERY loud to compensate for not yet having the words to describe the thoughts that lived inside you as they to get out. You were clingy, terrified of being left alone for even a few minutes. I remember having to find excuses to lock myself in the bathroom sometimes because I had never been around something that needed me so much. I genuinely thought you might collapse if I even hinted that I needed space and I was terrified to let you down. You were always with me, always touching me or sitting on me, or asking questions nonstop.  I used to drive in complete silence everywhere I went, just because everything had become so loud all of the time. 

To watch you feel safe enough to start to develop your own ideas, your own feelings and opinions on the way you thought the world should be, was genuinely one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

But like any child growing up, that growth also came with the pain required for change. You became confused as the settings and truths in the memories you held turned from fun and innocent to sinister and traumatic. The brightly colored backdrop your mind had created to hide the world behind it, fell, and it was more frightening than you could have ever been prepared for. 

You never deserved to live through the depth of heartbreak and suffering that you  were now facing, and you were defenseless.

You became reckless, and your actions became that of someone who had found themselves in a nightmare that they had never been taught how to wake up from. The pain that I watched you fight to understand, was like watching someone slowly suffocate, and it left us both with memories and scars that will never fade 

I have shed more tears, experienced more fear, and held more anger in the years I’ve had with you than if I had raised you from birth. And for a long time, everytime I was away from you, the only thought my brain could hold was “will they be alive when I get back”.

I was terrified you wouldn’t make it.

But as the leaves fell, and the winter chilled us to our bones, slowly, all that had died down to almost the roots, started to grow again. Tiny petals were visible underneath the melting snow, trees that had looked dried out, began to form small leaves all over their branches. Places in you that had frozen, started to thaw. 

You have blossomed into the most beautiful, selfless, confident and empathetic human I have ever seen. Somehow, in the darkness that you had been trying so hard to hide, that you were forced to face, unprepared and as tiny as you were, you found a spot of light and were brave enough to follow it out. You got out on your own. You found your strength in that truth you were so terrified to see, and you came out scared, and strong, and absolutely radiant. 

You are my role model. You are the definition of unconditional love. You see people as good even when you have every right not to. You fight so hard for what matters to you, and you fight so fucking hard for yourself. You went from a clumsy, loud, afraid child, to a (let’s be so fr) clumsy, loud, brave adult who genuinely leaves everyone better just for having met you. You still experience fear all of the time, but you stay.

You could have left. You could have made all the pain and all the heartbreak stop, but you chose to stay and hope for something more. There is no bravery, without being afraid first.

I may not have held you when you were born, but I’ve held you when you were dying. I may not have tucked you in when you were little but I’ve tucked you in when you were big. I didn’t see your first steps, but I am so thankful I got to watch you as you chose not to take your last. 

You are the light of my life. My platonic soulmate. My heart outside of my body. You have been so strong, and you are going to do so much good that you will create a life for so many people that they will never have to even paint that brightly backdrop in the first place. 

I’m so proud of you. I love you with every breath I have in me. You will never be alone again. You will always be enough. You came in trying to show only light. Then, you were only able to hold onto darkness. 

Now you are both. Day and night. Sun and moon. And what is day anyway, without the night?