You already know.

You don’t need me to say it, because you have 4.5 pages in front of you that say it better than three words I say to my dog every day ever could.

You don’t need to hear that I love it when you ask for my opinion on something because you honestly want to hear it.

You don’t need to hear that I love listening to you talk about sports.

Or that I loved that you got tears in your eyes when you talked about your childhood hero.

You don’t need to hear that I love how you see everything – every little detail, every little microexpression (or, let’s face it, macroexpression in my case).

You don’t need me to tell you that I love that, in such a short time, you’ve come to understand things about me better than most people, including my friends; like how everything causes me an inappropriate level of anxiety.

Or that I love that every time I see you, you seem genuinely happy to see me too.

You don’t need to hear that I love how you knew when you were 20 that school wasn’t for you, so you spent the next, what, seven years, figuring your shit out. And then when you did, you found something about which you’re passionate and you’re going to be a badass in grad school.

And you don’t need to hear that I love the color of your eyes and the goofiness (sorry) of your smile and that stupid, smug look you get on your face when you know you’ve made a good point.

You don’t need me to say any of that, because you already know.

Horrible isn't it?

I fell in love with a boy.

I haven't told him, even though I've learned the value of telling people the important things when you have the chance. So he doesn't know I love him, although I think he might have his suspicions.

Yesterday, I stayed awake for 36 hours and travelled approximately 1600 miles in a giant loop that included DC, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Chicago, Baltimore, and all kinds of places in between in order to spend one last little bit of time with him before he left for his hometown of San Diego and then Malta...for a year and a half. Possibly never to return to either of the two cities in which I live.

Some people think this was a mistake. Or, if not a mistake exactly, indicative of some serious craziness on my part. Perhaps I am crazy. But I don't regret one second of those 24 hours - except maybe when I had to look away from him as he sat on a chair in the Cincinnati airport, waiting for his plane to Houston, so I could board my flight to Chicago. I have this clear image of his posture and the look on his face. It was like looking at a reflection of myself and how I felt - panic and pain and a sadness that was half resignation and half anger.

There are a million and one sayings about love and loss and friendship and the people who are important in your life. Some of them are about how, occasionally, people are only meant to be around for a short time, some are about letting something you love go and having faith that it will return, others are about the value of love even in the face of loss. I've been in love before and I've been in relationships that I thought were going to last longer than they did, had friends I thought would be around longer than they were. But never have I felt anything like what I felt boarding that plane yesterday. Perhaps it was a combination of exhaustion, dehydration, and the overwhelming feeling of stagnation I've been having about my life recently that contributed to it. But somehow I doubt that. I know with a certainty that I've had very few times before in my life that I had to let go of something wonderful yesterday.

But this, more than anything is why I know that every stressful, beautiful, weird, exhausting, too-short second of yesterday was absolutely worth all the hurt and all the anxiety and all the questioning: because of the color of the wheat fields.