I Choose To Love You, Every Day

Loving you is a choice I make every day.

We are not together. We were never "Facebook official." All we had were moments inside of moments. All I got were glimmers-- snapshots-- of what we could be. But that was enough for me. Until it wasn't. Now it's all I have left, so yeah, I think about those moments a lot.

The could be's and the should be's. I could be your girlfriend. We should be dating. I could be the best thing that's ever happened to you. I should be the one you choose, too. I could put up with you for the next sixty years. We should be spending that together.

I got one perfect night with you, and then I got another one, and that was really it. I got the dinner and the movie and the cliche make out sesh. I got hand holding and stargazing in my favorite place on earth. But see, the problem is honey, I still don't have you. At least, not in the way I want you.

If I could add up all the moments in my head they'd still never measure up to the future I think we could still have. That I still want.

I told you I want my friend back. That is true. That will never change. And I will not challenge or question your judgment in that. But I am also still a firm believer that you and I could be so much more.

We could be the ones who make it. Who tell their grandkids they met at a movie theatre when they were fifteen and I was actually supposed to be there for another guy. That I've loved you every day since.

Loving you is a choice I make every day. It doesn't come easy and it is not effortless. I'm holding on to something I should have let go of a long time ago. I can't say for sure why I do it. It's not a safety net; it's an empty black hole.

I'll never know what feelings, or lack of, lay beyond the other side. I've had the glimmers, and I've had the snapshots, and I guess I just really have this feeling. I'm just putting my trust and my faith in something bigger that if it is meant to be, it will fall together. And until then, I will love you, as I have for every day that I've known you. As a friend, a best friend, a soulmate.

I will do that, not because I'm expecting anything out of it. I will do that because I want to. Because I have made the commitment to myself to do that. It's beyond the passion and the feeling and the chemistry I always said I'd fight for; never settle. It's that and more. Safety, hard work, and home.

I am crazy. I am intense. I hold on to things too tightly that I should let go. I do not take no for an answer easily and I did walk out of your life for two years. But I came back because I'm ready (for now). I came back because I couldn't separate the two before, but now I can.

I'm not just the girl who's still helplessly in love with a boy she can't have. I'm the woman who makes the choice to keep loving you. I was the one who also promised to be your friend first, and I let you down in that promise. I'm the one who intends to keep that promise now.

So I can be both: the woman who chooses to love you, and intends to uphold the promise of friendship above and over that love. Now it's time for you to decide who you are: the man who knows he can love me and still be a best friend first, or the man who has chosen not to love me at all.