We crave your time. We crave you in the quiet of a Sunday afternoon, in the thunder of a Thursday storm. We don’t need much, just bring us your heart, pinned to your sleeve. Just bring us your mind, cupped within your palms. Bring us your closeness, your unhinged ribcage, your dreams and your aspirations. Bring us the key to the world you hold within you, and we will explore it. We will always explore it.

We crave your understanding. We crave the ability to be who we are — the over thinking, daydreaming, messy hearted human beings who have the loudest worlds tucked beneath their skin. We crave acceptance — your arms around us when we need to leave the party, a smile on your face as we walk towards the exit, a nudge that says “It’s okay to be drained. It’s okay.”

We crave your patience. We crave time — time to figure out the feelings that jump and leap and shout inside us. We tread so deeply, we sometimes drown. Love overstimulates us, it plants seeds in our lungs and sometimes it gets hard to breathe. We crave permission to pluck the weeds from within our chests, we crave permission to learn how to wade in our depths, until we know how to swim. We crave your confidence in us, in our ability to dig up what we want to express to you. Because we do care, we do; we just want to be sure of ourselves, we just want to be sure of our heart, before we allow someone to make a home within us.

We crave your distance. We crave room to stretch our limbs, soft moments where nothing is expected of us. This is how we connect with our softness, this is how we connect with our quiet. When this happens, we crave the ability to be alone without hurting you — without causing you to retreat into your mind; without making you believe that you did something wrong or that we have lost interest. Trust me — if we love you, we love you, but we crave your compassion, your empathy, because moments alone with our hopes and our dreams are just as important as the moments we spend with you. They are our strength. They are our comfort, our fuel, our paradise.

But most of all, we crave your knowledge of us. We crave the way you see the small things we do as declarations of our love. See, when we do extroverted things with you, when we come out with you and dance with you and laugh out loud with you, we want you to know what that means. How we love seeing you happy. How it makes it all worth it, even if it makes us weary.

And when we invite you into our heads, when we show you our favourite dog eared books or cry in front of you while watching our favourite movie, when we share with you these extensions of who we are, and what shaped the very foundation of our souls, we want you to know what that means. How hard that is for us. How we try for you. How we will always try for you.