#8.14.2014

Dear Kates,

Today you left for NET, and I wasn't there to see you off. I wasn't there for family dinner, to help you pack, or to wave as your parents drove you to the NET center to deliver you at the doorstep of your next adventure. These statements hurt, and yet it's what I expected, given how things settle with us at present. Despite all this, focusing on what I missed out on would be a real selfish way to go about the start of this project, and that's entirely not my intention.

You're gone for the next 9 months, and I know that realistically I'll probably only see you a handful of times between when you head out on the road and next May when you return. That thought brought me to tears as I drove down 35W into work this morning, and although that seems silly because that's about as often as we made time for one another this summer, it was unsettling nonetheless.

Your love language is coffee dates and the baring of souls while wrapped up in blankets with infinite possibilities in your eyes and your Bible in hand. These next 9 months don't exactly give me the opportunity to rectify our relationship with those things, and I took for granted the ability to do just that while you were home. Forgive me? I can't buy your Caribou or ask, meekly, for you to teach me how to read the good book, though those things might surely be a faster way to the parts of your heart I once knew, and now don't, but I have a tiny, unrelenting desire to prevent these 9 months from keeping us stagnant and politely cordial. While meeting up to walk Amos and see your family aren't possibilities for a while, I can still invite you in. Not into my house or work, but into my heart and all the integral places you need to be if we're going to try and make right our decade of friendship from here on out. You don't place as much value into words as I do, but behind these words are elements of your love language: carved away blocks of time especially for this purpose, stolen moments of reflection on what, exactly, I need you to know, and an incredible amount of intentional love.

I struggle to understand that uneven reciprocation doesn't necessarily mean an uneven value placed behind a relationship. Not being able to hear that any of this might hit home, or that you do or don't appreciate the efforts going into this, will be hard, and I know that it's probably more than likely that I'll stop this after a few days of writing because I'll think to myself "what's the point, she isn't seeing it, she hasn't talked to me about it, she doesn't care". I hope I don't. Because I can't help but feel that unless I try, try even when that can't be reciprocated, that you and I will no longer be a 'we' but two completely separate entities: 'you' and 'I'. That scares me. Until now we've had tiffs and periods of separation, but I think it was always unquestioned that that was temporary. This bridge, to me, feels uncomfortably like it might become a permanent fixture if we continue as we are, and I know, with certainty, that isn't what I want to happen.

So here are my words and time and letters and secrets and worries and life for the next 9 months. Treat them carefully and understand that they're not given lightly and are headed into an unknown variable that I can't control: the way you'll receive them. 

Love to you, Kates.