Have you seen that video of Taylor Swift getting a Grammy and realizing that was what she always wanted? She goes, “Oh my god, that was all you ever wanted.” I think I feel the fear that she felt then when I see you. I think I begged for you, cried for you and struggled on my darkest days hoping for your existence. I think I wrote about you so much that I willed you into existence. I think you came straight out of my notebook pages because I have written poems about this kind of love. I have written poems that I didn’t know were going to be applicable to us. I think some silent God was listening to prayers that I whispered into the night, prayers that I held onto when reality was shaky and scribbling endlessly on white pages was the only respite. Those pages that I clutched so hard with anger that the wrinkles are still visible and whose surface has become hardened by my tears, I can finally draw stupid tiny hearts on them. Am I too happy?

As I shudder with fear at the remembrance of every wrong step, every wrong hand held, every betrayal that felt like I deserved it, every forever that I lost on the way to you, I get scared to take the next step. But I take it anyway, because I have come too far to stop, and when each next step is a solid footing and not a trap to make me trip and fall and there is a hand always visible to hold me if I do, it feels too good to be true and yet I feel like I knew this was going to happen for me.

If something like an ‘inner child’ exists for me then your effect on her can only be described as ‘healing’. When you hold me now, you hold me when I was four and fourteen, when I was six and sixteen, when I was too mature for my age and when I was rebellious, mean and spoiled for no reason. Your hold on me makes me gasp for air but I don’t mean it like you are suffocating me. It is a gasp of finally finding air when you were sure you were going to drown, when there was only water all around and the only thing visible were the rays of the sun at a single point and you were sure there was no point in trying now because trying only exhausted your limbs further and it has been just too long for someone to not notice you had been drowning and the feeling had started to set in that no one is coming to save you.