Not to be cliché, because I know you hate that, but before I met you, I doubted the ease in which friendships could be made. Being a skeptic, I didn’t see how I could grow to love a person that I knew so little about, and I didn’t see how a person who knew so little about me could “love” me as much as my Big claimed to, whoever she was.

It wasn’t possible, I decided, to love someone that I didn’t even know, someone who I had yet to “meet”.

I remember finally realizing how wrong I was to be so skeptical. It was a day, even before we got our first gifts, when I was eating ice cream with you on our rose buddy date. We were talking, about what I don’t remember, and we started to laugh. The kind of laugh that makes your stomach hurt and your eyes tear up. The genuine kind. And it was in that moment that I decided, even if you weren’t my Big, there was something special there, a lifelong-friendship connection.

But it was on that day that I started to hope it was you.

The day I found out you were my Big was preceded by days of lunches together, laughter at our friends’ expense, and growing closer to you than I ever thought I could. It’s fair to say that you were one of my first college friends, and it was in your presence that I finally started to feel as though I had my footing. It seemed perfectly right, I decided on reveal day, that we were Big and Little now. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

And I know that Maddie Squared isn't big on emotion, but I cried a lot on reveal day. Sorry, but the happiness was overwhelming.

It was in the days after that in which we truly discovered just how deep our similarities ran: same nickname and middle name, being Diet Coke addicts (It’s okay, we can admit it, right?), and our hatred for most people, the glue that kept us together.

I have yet to say this to you until now for fear of being overly sentimental, but I look up to you. When I am older, done at this college with only memories of the days and nights I spent adoring my life here, I hope that I am half the woman that you are.

I know you don’t think of yourself all that highly, but to me, you are what it means to be successful. You should think of yourself that highly because you are a queen, you are Superwoman. The way in which you handle even the most stressful of situations is something to admire. You always manage to get through, and do so with grace. I brag about you a lot, but only because you’re my favorite person in the whole world.

Here’s to you, to the countless inside jokes, to the nights spent ranting about anything and everything as we do homework and struggle to get by. Before you, I had no idea such close friendships could be formed so effortlessly.

Thank you for believing in me, for being there when I need you, and most of all for showing me a world of endless laughter (even if we’re almost always laughing at Dylan Barron).

I love you dearly, Maddie.

Maddie Squared will take on the world someday. Just give us some time first.