Thank you. You walked into my life, took a look around at the tatters and broken pieces, and decided to stay anyway. When you get used to someone walking away rather quickly without a backwards glance, to have someone stay is a remarkable feat.

You put me above many factors in your life, something I do not deserve and I am not wholly used to. You are honest and kind. You build me up and support me. You take care of me when I’m sick, worry about me when I’m gone, and root for me to succeed while never hoping I actually fail.

I’m not good at writing like this. When it’s just a one-on-one conversation, I’m better, but you deserve praise in a public platform, so here we are. When I write like this, it’s mostly to express hurt and past grievances, to heal a part of me that has been broken for as long as I can remember. It’s therapeutic, cathartic. It’s not done for anyone else, it is done for myself. However, this one, this piece that I’ve been writing and rewriting and scrapping because it’s never quite right, this one is entirely for you.

Not because you asked for it, I’d been trying to write something like this for weeks before you expressed interest in being forever immortalized in print. I would start a piece, it never would come out right, never captured your essence or my appreciation for you. For everything you have done and will continue to do.

I’m not the poetic one between us two, I read the words of Neruda, Frost, Yeats, Emerson, Thoreau, Shakespeare, etc. and cannot compare nor replicate. But this, this is my attempt at expressing my love and gratitude for you.

There aren’t enough words in the English language, nor any language really, to tell you just how thankful I am that you entered my life and decided to remain a part of it. Easily you could have walked away, and it wouldn’t have been a new or revolutionary experience, but it could possibly have been the most devastating by far, for you know the most about me. More than any other person on the planet. But after seemingly endless streams of tears, more tears than I would have shed over anyone else no doubt, I would have found a way to live without you, you who have become a huge factor in my life. It may not have been pretty, and it would have been difficult, but I would have found a way to survive, and what's more, I would have found a way to live.

But you did not make me have to do this. You decided to stay, you chose not to walk away from the get-go. And for that, I will always love you and be grateful to you. But if one day you do decide to walk away, don't think I'll hate you or will forget about you. I will fondly remember the kind of person you are and what you were to me in the time we spent together.

Perhaps this isn’t what you expected from a work of heart from me to you, but this is all that I can bare to allow the world to know, for all other words are for my lips and your ears, my fingers and your eyes, and no others.

So, again, thank you. For walking into my life, not minding it was battered, and helping to pick up the pieces. Helping put me together so I may someday be whole. Thank you.

Love,