Dear Fany,

I’m fairly certain I will never love anyone like I love you.

The first time this thought occurred to me, you wouldn’t believe how pathetic it made me feel. I would have tried to deny it, had I not known that this was exactly the kind of cheesy suppressed confessions that would unfailingly spill out instead of vomit when I got drunk. Okay, spill out along with vomit. Anyway, I made the executive decision to go with the lesser of the two evils and allowed said pitiful thought to take root in my brain. The conviction that grew from it day by day now stands there like a ginormous evergreen tree, making the rest of me feel both small and sheltered in its shade.

I love all the other girls too, of course. And my family, and Zero, as you well know. And it is possible (at least, I hope) that one day I will settle down with a partner, and it will be difficult to arrange the different pieces of my heart on a scale and weigh my love for them against my love for you, my best friend in the world.

But I’m not talking about more or less here. I’m saying it will never be the same. I will never love with so much ignorance and desperation and general idiocy as I did at fifteen years old. We’ve become weirdly similar people over the years, but this hasn’t always been the case. You, who have every reason to be guarded, have instead been open and giving from the start, while teenage me was a reserved, calculative thing. But I was way too young and stupid to actually succeed at rese