A couple of days ago, I was talking with a friend about what love looked like. We settled on a pretty simplified definition, that love is a mutual, deep understanding of and radical acceptance and celebration of another person. It blossoms with vulnerability, time and focusing on what people share instead of what they don’t. 

The conversation moved me to consider what has created the strongest, most innate and inexplicable loves that I have felt in my lifetime. Each of them I can tie back to a single moment. A moment where I shared myself with someone in the deepest possible way, they reciprocated, and we felt innately connected and infinitely safe with one another. There was a moment I told my best friend from home that we shared the same soul. Another where I spent all night talking with a friend, and we found that the struggles we were most ashamed of we had in common. The moment I helped a friend when she was at her weakest, and she, in turn, helped me what I was at mine. 

I realized that I needed to live my life in pursuit of love, for love, and with love. Any preposition could be put before that to be honest with you. To ignore those moments of innate connection, where I feel deeply understood by another person, I feel they deeply understand me, especially when it happens so quickly, would be to deprive myself of the life I truly want to live. 

When I met you, it was like everything you said I not just agreed with, but had felt the same way in the past but struggled to articulate. You see the world like I do, you understand love like I do, and you want the same out of a relationship as I do. The coincidences were too numerous. 

Even so, there were things you did that completely surprised me. I already mentioned how you stopped and looked at the moon over that construction site and said it looked like the ocean. I was feeling the same way—I was transported to a lake up in the mountains in Montana that I grew up going to, even before you said anything. That was the sort of thing that I appreciate (beauty manifests itself in unexpected places, after all) but few others do. But you don’t seem to find it difficult to infuse joy, love, and meaning in all parts of your life. And that is someone I, (and the rest of the world) is always searching for. 

When we got back to my dorm I wanted to badly to ask you to stay over. We didn’t even necessarily have to do anything, but I just wanted to hold you, and for you to hold me. I wanted to make that feeling, that the universe is converging to bring us together, last a little longer. 

I didn’t because I don’t want to pressure you into anything. This is a complicated situation, and I understand that. I don’t want to make things difficult, and I also don’t want to sacrifice myself for someone else again.

But I feel so deeply connected to you. I’ll play the long game, you’re worth it. Know that I’m not backing down, because I refuse to ignore the seeds of love and pretend I can manufacture my own. Because, as I have learned, nobody can. 

Don’t be a stranger, 

Mason