Four times

It’s never been easy,

With you on my mind.

But I am in your corner,

And you are in mine.

-Charlotte Cornfield

I realize I fell in love with you three times.

The first time I fell in love with you happened in boozy bars and beer gardens with beautiful women, and at summertime music festivals, on bike rides, rail bridges, and lakes, all snapshots of time, snippets of experience. Each of them frozen instances, each one equally as intense as the last. If it is true what they say; that love isn’t really about what you feel, but how intensely you feel it, then it was also true then that everything I felt about you was turned up all the way up to 11.

The second time I fell in love with you was in a future I imagined, one I dreamed up without your knowledge. One in which you never knew you existed, and one you would never actually agree to. But it was nice and hopeful and comforting. There were adventures, and long talks, and songs with good lyrics. There was also domesticity, and longing, late-night goodbyes and early-morning reunions at airport terminals, with long heartfelt messages in between. It was frenzied, but familiar, and I tricked myself into thinking this was really you. Your heart was a ship out at sea and I wanted desperately to be your safe harbour.

The third time I fell in love with you, it was in my head, and I hated you for it. You were a fog that refused to lift, a static I never wanted to stop hearing. The spectre of all things that could not have been. I wanted you gone, and all your memories gone with you, and I thought you would never fade, but fade slowly you did. And in the quiet that followed, I never really asked myself what it was about the noise and the fog that kept me rooted in it for so long, wanting to keep hearing it, wanting to keep wandering through it again and again, looking for something that wasn’t there.

And now we sit here together as friends, and I think back to the times where I was always trying to move my pride and my wounded ego out of the way, so that I could finally see you clearly, and see you for who you are. It was hard. It was work, and it took me a long way from where I was, sometimes fighting myself each step of the way there. Maybe this is the fourth time, and those big feelings that were turned up to 11 not so long ago are never gone, but now I feel them differently. Now the longing is much more familiar than frenzied, the goodbyes end with laughs instead of tears, and those long heartfelt messages in between are what tells me I found in you someone who understands, and will always keep trying to understand.

You ask me how we are supposed to do this, how this works, and I don’t really have a rule book. All I have is the benefit of hindsight, and the voice in my head that keeps saying to me that this is a friendship worth nurturing. That I like being invested in your happiness, and that all of the things I treasured about you as a person, I continue to treasure: your kindness and resilience, your thoughtful advice, your curiosity and your easy laughs. I am not pretending it is always easy, but I don’t doubt for a second that it is worth it.

There will always be songs with great lyrics with you. There will always be long talks and adventures. And, after a hard month or a year, you will always find a safe harbour here.