I wish I remembered the very first instance that I met you.
I also kind of wish we could go back to freshman year for a week and lay in our beds with the music playing on the alarm clock for 20 minutes before we got up to microwave oatmeal before morning practice. Except let’s be real, I’d rather go back to senior year Wine Wednesdays in the living room; or climbing up onto the roof from your balcony with a bottle of wine to admire the full moon; or obviously going with you, dressed up, to a sexual ecstatic dance yoga fitness class! And gluing rhinestones on each other’s faces for parties.
Or I would even rather go back and stay forever in our dance parties and karaoke sessions in the basement. I still remember so clearly the morning after, when you were getting ready to leave for work, that you turned the music back on your phone and left it outside my door so that I could wake up with you and start the day dancing with you at 6am.
You have such an amazing energy and such an incredible way of maintaining it.
You are one of the most positive people I know and your youthful enthusiasm is one of my favorite characteristics that a person can have, and I love that we bring that part out in each other. I still can’t get over when you walked out the door of the spin class in NYC, when Katie and I were absolutely convinced there was no way you were going to make it there. We thought you were delusional for thinking you could make it across the country on a red eye flight, with a long layover, land in NYC never having been, drag your suitcase with you, and find your way to an early morning spin class on a foreign train system, with a phone that had run out of batteries.
I am very rarely surprised, and that was solid gold.
It made me so happy. So did the other week, when you walked in the front door, two hours late of course but without warning or explanation, with two bottles of wine, and without informing me that you were planning to sleep over, proceeding to pour both the bottles for us. I everything I love about you at once.
I don’t know how else to phrase this, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you not-peppy.
You have an incredible ability to maintain either a genuine or the most convincing facade of your amazingly happy self unlike anyone I know.
I remember a very specific day in college, when you were going to the doctors to have diagnostic tests run because of the health problems you had secretly been dealing with. You hadn’t told anyone else in the house yet beside me. You weren’t allowed to eat solid foods, so you were eating jello. Since no one else knew, they ridiculed you as you sat there eating your jello before practice. In that moment I felt so sad for you but also so impressed. Whether it affected you and how much, I have no idea. But on appearances alone, I couldn’t believe how you maintained composure and just kept smiling, letting it roll over you, seemingly unaffected. You were able to put on such a face that no one would have any idea what you were going through or what you were feeling. I couldn’t tell what you were feeling, I could only admire your ability to persevere.
I’m so glad to have your youthful enthusiasm in my life.
Please don’t ever stop entertaining me.
I love you, and I’m pretty sure that everyone who has ever met you loves you.
Please remember, and don’t be afraid of honesty; with yourself or with others.
Be yourself.
Stay amazing.