In the midst of losing myself and pretending to be a lot of things I wasn’t maybe I had everyone else fooled. Maybe I even had myself fooled but not you.
Despite the front I put up and the walls I hit behind you saw right through me.
It’s scary to meet someone who knows you better than you know yourself.
It’s even scarier to meet someone who is so much like you, you realize you can’t pretend around them.
Someone who understands the things you don’t say.
Someone who takes to time to read between the lines between awkward facial expressions and fridging hands.
Someone who can tell you’re nervous because of a habit no one else has watched closely enough to pick up on.
Someone who can tell what type of day you’re having based on your tone or the dilect you choose in a single text.
When the words, ‘how are you?’ carry a heavy weight because you know the only reason they are asking is, they know something you haven’t even told them yet.
You wonder how two people connect on such a level where dialogue isn’t needed to understand one another.
Arms you can collapse into when everything becomes too much. And you don’t even have to feel bad about it.
Hands to wipe your tears even though very few people have ever seen you cry.
And someone to tell you, you’ve never looked more beautiful even though you feel like a mess.
I played the role of what people needed. I played the role of what I thought people wanted.
The cost was losing myself at the expense of appeasing them.
But I never had you fooled.
You’d still manage to look at me across the room and it was a simple exchange of contact without any words of ‘why are you trying to be this person you aren’t.’
But you never tried to change me or push me in one direction or the other. You just walked with me accepting me, realizing when this phase ended and everyone left, that’s when I’d would need someone the most.
You took the time to learn about every scar running your fingers over it showing me the past didn’t have to hurt and it was okay to feel these things that deeply.
You took the time to learn exactly why I was the way I was and you taught me I wasn’t to blame for a lot of the things that happened to me.
You took the time to love me and accept me for exactly who I was and through your acceptance I learned to like myself a little more.
Healing started and ended with you. Because you taught me who I was. You taught me about the person I wanted to be. And you showed me in a world full of people who spend a lot of time pretending to be someone they aren’t, I didn’t have to anymore. 
