To the girl who saved my life:

Recently, I have come to understand that we’re shaped by a lot of people over the course of our lives. The people who break your confidence and the ones who restore it. The people who play with your feelings and the ones who make you feel worthwhile. The people who make you hate yourself and the ones who remind you how special you are.

But the best person in the world, the one who makes you exactly who you are, is all of those people combined. They break your heart, and then patch it together again. They make you feel worthless (hopefully, not too often...) and worthwhile. And as much as you can desperately hate them at times, you love them more than anything in this universe, simply because they saw you. And when everyone else wrote you off, they reached out a hand to you. They made you whole.

You loved me. Every day you would say it to me, and more, you would prove it me, writing me notes to read during my most boring classes, hanging out with me in homeroom when I refused to interact out in the halls, sitting with me on the school bus even though I acted like I didn't want you around. And, to be clear, in the beginning I really didn't want you around. I wanted to wallow (thank God you wouldn't let me). You would chirp in my ear all day, always happy, always kind - at least, those are the moments I remember now - and somewhere along the way, I began to love you despite how annoying you could be.

Do you remember the first time I ever said I love you back? You worked hard in middle school to wrench it out of me, and eventually it slipped out. I felt so awkward because I didn't feel I really deserved your love, and to reciprocate meant that I believed you loved me, too. But eventually, the words felt at home in my mouth and from that day forward, I began to find myself.

But it wasn't all happiness. Even back then I knew I shouldn’t have loved you so much - loving you was a one-way path of destruction, and honestly, it almost destroyed me. Because when I finally found my footing, you fell to pieces. I spent years and years blaming myself for your hurting, even when it wasn’t my fault. And you used my love, over and over, slowly destroying the person you'd helped me become. Sometimes I still lie awake at night, bitter for those moments; a part of me, I suppose, will always harbor a tiny portion of that hurt.

But a larger part of me knows that if I had never met you, I would not be who I am today. I wouldn’t be as confident, or even as caring. I would still be the shy girl who was afraid of having an opinion, because what if someone disagreed with me? I was afraid of just being myself, because I didn't think very much of myself at all. You taught me what it meant to take risks, to go out on a limb, to have a thought and say it and screw other people if they didn't like it or me. The important thing is that I have to like me.

And a lot of times in those years, I didn’t. Sometimes I still don’t. You were the first person, though, who heard my voice and didn’t turn away. You didn't overpower my opinion with your own, but listened when I talked as if I had something interesting to say. Sometimes I wonder who I would be if you had laughed at me or talked over me. I’m not sure I’d be anyone – maybe I would have just become whatever the world wanted of me, too scared to step out and be myself.

The bottom line is that most days, I disliked you a lot, and I think you knew it from the way I acted out. But every day, I loved you so much more than anything else. I loved you for listening to me when I was hurting, for hugging me when I was sad, for caring about my opinion for a change. I loved you for wanting to know me, the real me underneath everything people thought of me.

To steal a line from Cristina Yang - you're my person. Sometimes you meet someone who, when you see them, your whole body just sighs in relief (a weird way to put it, I know, but it's hard to describe). When they aren’t there, you function just fine, but there’s always a small ache in your chest, a missing piece. And when suddenly they’re there, your muscles relax, and it seems like for the first time since you last saw them, you can breathe again.

You're it for me. You make me feel safe and whole when everything aches and everything is wrong. And, as people have consistently told me over the years, we make absolutely no sense as friends, but we work. We fight (horrible fights, really) and we make mistakes (big ones) and sometimes I think we'll never recover, but we always do. And I will never be able to thank you enough for saving my life, and changing it, and really just giving me the strength to be me.

I love you. Good times, bad times, absolutely horrible times - I love you. You'll always be my best friend, and I hope you know that.