I can't stop writing about you. You're quickly filling the pages of my journal. I take it on the train with me hoping that the sound of steel grinding against itself will be loud enough to drown you out of my thoughts for a second, but ironically you quiet that noise. And when it's quiet, you're all I hear.
Some nights, just before I'm falling asleep, I'll roll over to my left and expect to see you taking up half of my bed and taking up way more than half of my sheets. And when you're not there, I imagine you are. Your cloudy gray eyes starting to be veiled by heavy eyelids threatening to shut out the rest of the world, myself included, until they part again the next morning. But just before that happens, you put your arm around me and you say "C'mere" because you just know. You always know somehow, exactly what I'm thinking and what I need at that moment. You make me laugh, you give me space when I need it, you challenge me, you hold my hand, you torture me endlessly, you finish my sentences and sometimes even speak my thoughts just as I'm thinking them.
That scares me a lot, Carter. I wrote an entire post on how I don't believe in soul mates, about how even though you're everything and more to me, I still couldn't fathom the idea of there being only one person for each human being in this world. I wrote about how I won't succumb to the idea of "destiny" and I think you'd agree with me on that. But I had to delete it because everyday you make me question if maybe it's not that I don't believe in soul mates, but that I've just been defining the concept wrong.
Do you remember, when we had been only dating for maybe 2-2 and a half months tops, and I mentioned I was going to Starbucks, never once mentioning what I was getting, but you just knew? And I asked how you knew and you said, "Oh well, I just know you that well." And maybe it's an insignificant thing in the grand scheme of things, my Starbucks drink order. Or maybe the detail in itself is insignificant, but the fact that you knew, or at the very least took the time to pay attention, is significant.
I'm not a believer in destiny or fate. I don't think we happened because of some cosmic quest that we are both embarking on that led us here. But there are a lot of times when I have to reflect on the grand design of our journey. Something like the butterfly effect, but closer to the watchmaker. Have you heard about that? It's about how if you were to find a watch, just somewhere in nature, you would have to assume that someone made it, because everything works so intricately and all the pieces are so deliberate, that it couldn't have just come into being.
It feels like that with us. I ask myself if all of life feels that way, if everything feels like the steps I took to get there were deliberate like the tiny cogs in a watch. But they don't. They don't feel as significant as Us. When I think about how I could've been in Connecticut right now, or California, or that you could be in Florida, or North Carolina, or anywhere in the world, but we're not... When I think about how you could've been just like the rest and moved on to some other girl. When I think about us all the way back in October, sitting in a bar watching Ax Cop, and laughing about God knows what. Do you even remember what we were talking about, cause I sure don't. When I think about the moment just before we first kissed and how I remember that more clearly than almost anything else we did that night because I swear that moment lasted for a century... When I leaned forward to rest against the bar and you followed me there and I just had to look at you, at those stormy gray eyes and I leaned in and you met me halfway, that was it, Carter. That moment, especially in hindsight, makes me think there's a watchmaker. That all these little things that could have happened, that would've left us as two separate entities, as we were before October 11, they're infinite. And the things that led us to each other are so specific, almost unlikely... Anything could have happened. You could have been anyone. But you're not, not to me at least.
I never thought I'd meet someone who would want to watch the cooking channel with me. Or someone who would walk 20 blocks in the rain with me. Or someone who would answer all my drunk calls. Or someone who could watch me fall apart for almost no reason at all, and would not only want to put me back together, but knew just how. Or someone who I could pee and barf in front of who would still call me beautiful just the same. Or God, just the way you look at me, someone who would look at me like the way you look at me. I thought I'd be lucky to find one or two of those things in someone. But you're all of that. And more, I could go on forever, really. All those tiny little cogs turning inside of you, making you Carter, my Carter, I can't believe it's a coincidence.
There's no way.
I don't know about soul mates. I don't know if I ever will believe in soul mates. The world is too big. Do you think about that? Maybe when you're out at sea and you can't see anything past the horizon but blue. But what I don't know is even more vast than the sea, so I'll get to what I do know. I do know you're my best friend. I know that I toe the very fine line between falling more in love with you everyday and not knowing how there's any more room in my tiny-fist sized heart. I know that whenever I'm with you it feels kind of familiar, like maybe I dreamed that this happened before, or that it happened in a past life and we're meeting again in this life. I know that I don't know what I'm trying to say. I know that doesn't matter because I could ramble forever, never having a point and you'd probably still get what I'm saying. And I know I love you. That's all I know, Carter. I'm okay not knowing the rest, as long as I get to figure some of the rest of it out with you.
