Why I’ll Always Love You More Than Anyone Else

I’ll always love you most because discovering you wasn’t just discovering you – it wasn’t learning your favorite bands and meeting your parents and tracing my fingers through the valleys of your skin. Discovering you was discovering love. It was discovering redemption. It was discovering Saturday mornings waking up in bed beside somebody else and not wanting to gather up my clothing and sneak out. It was discovering letting someone see me – all my failures and my fuck-ups and my raw, uncomfortable honesties and realizing that they could love me anyway. It was seeing someone else’s ugliness and insecurity and pain and realizing that I could love them anyway, too. That I could stare down the murkiest, most unsavory realities of somebody’s character and want to choose them all the more because of them. I will always love you more than anybody else because I saw the worst in you and you saw the worst in me and we lived in those ugly, unsavory houses our mistakes made. We were residents of them, together. We survived them. And they still feel like the only honest truth. I’ll always love you more than anyone else because everyone else is just a blueprint. Just a skeleton, a ghost of what we once unearthed and discovering them isn’t discovering anything new. Every other body is only a body. Every other mind is just a system of synapses and neurons, firing in time alongside mine. I will always love you the most because when you grow up in a room that you’re sure is sealed shut, the second window you discover is just a window. Just a nice view, no matter which direction it gazes out on. I will always love you most because you were the first goddamned window. Because loving you broke through a wall that I didn’t realize could be punctured. Because loving you made me realize we are not meant to stay sealed shut in the room of all our pains and mistakes. Because you were the first breathe of fresh air. Air I never expected to breathe. And after that first hit of oxygen, nothing ever tastes quite as sweet again.