Dear Maria,

Two days ago I had my first conversation with you since you got back from Thailand. Last night I texted you giving you advice about how you are nervous for college, only after you gave me advice about how I am nervous to stay in high school. These interactions reach into a place deep inside of me and make that place warmer. They are a familiar safe haven in my day, repeatedly keeping me on my feet and guiding me back to what’s important. Every interaction that I have with you, even the little ones, enables me to walk away with a greater understanding for what it means to be alive.

Yet every interaction that we have had recently has been shadowed by the fact that it will be one of our last. Soon you will know everything, and there will be no more late night advice texts. There will be no more car rides, no more nights at your house, no more of the unique secret language that you and I have invented to address our elephant in the room.

I am voluntarily giving these things up even though it hurts me, because at this point it feels like I have a responsibility to usher both of us out of this experience with honesty. I could have let you go onto college without ever knowing. I could have spared myself the stunning vulnerability that I know is to come. I could have done a variety of things that would have made this perceivably easier for both of us, but I neglect to do those things because it feels like it would be a dishonor to all that we have experienced together.

Maria Rae Kennedy-Rose, if there is one thing that you know about me I want it to be this: loving you is one of the most meaningful things I have ever been a part of. Without you I would have no idea who I am, why I am, or what is worth living for. At a time in our lives when we do not yet know who we are, you are the only thing that I can make sense of and simultaneously the most confusing part. You are the perfect mixture of the reason that I get out of bed every morning and the reason that I don’t want to. You are the euphoria and the heartache at the same time, constantly a paradox, because you are everything that I do.

Knowing this, I could not let you stumble away from me in oblivion, but I also could not let myself continue to be as close to you as I am now. I wanted to come visit you at college. I wanted to check in on you regularly and never lose touch. When you were lonely and trying to adjust, I wanted to be there. Above all, I wanted to continue to make your burdens my own, because I love you.

But at a certain point even I know that to continue this relationship as it is now would be to beat a dead horse into the ground. No matter how much warmth my love for you may bring me (and believe me, it’s a lot), at the end of the day I am a person who is in love with someone who does not love me back, and the heartache has become too familiar. The pain fits just a little too comfortably, this journal knows your name a little too well.

You were a necessary and beautiful part of my growing up, but I can not escape the fact that this stage must now come to a close. There are ways that I need to grow that go beyond you. There are other heartaches I need to feel, other lessons I need to learn, and even as impossible as it seems to me right now, other people I need to fall in love with. I am tempted to continue to give into the temptation of loving you because it is one of the things in this life that I best know how to do, but I know that I can not give into this temptation because I must instead do what is good for me. And I know that I am worthy of what is good for me because I loved you.

I need to let you go in a way that honors the immense weight of all that I am letting go. And for this reason you deserve to know everything. Even if you don’t immediately want to, and I imagine that you won’t. I imagine that this declaration is going to be met with a certain degree of hesitance. It always is. That is the nature of my love for you and something that I proudly accept, or else I would not be losing sleep to write you this love letter with the intention of feeling every second of this as deeply as I can.

Hesitance to embrace a merciless heart-pouring that you can not reciprocate is a completely natural reaction that no one will hold against you. But whether or not you chose to lean into the discomfort will be your choice. And although I can not control what you do I will confess that I have a preference. I hope that you do not run from what I am going to tell you.

You have nothing to be scared of, Netanya. I have not once, nor will I ever, have the intention of hurting you. I love you, that’s all. You don’t have to love me back, you don’t have to say the right thing, all that you must do is know that I love you.

For all of these reasons I am going to tell you. Whether or not you run from me is your decision, but I will make no effort to hide the fact that I hope that you don’t.

As the days wind down, I will focus on making the most of the last moments that we have together before all of this is taken away.

Your friend,

Netanya