🐱🍑📢This message is for you🐱🍑📢

 There’s something impossibly tender about growing up alongside someone. You don’t realize it at first — that the boy who shared his fruit snacks with you in kindergarten, or the girl who let you copy her math homework in fifth grade, might one day become the person you wake up smiling next to.

For us, it started with scraped knees and backyard adventures.

We were neighbors — the kind where your mom sends you over with a plate of cookies, and you end up staying for dinner. We played tag until the streetlights came on, made blanket forts that stayed up for weeks, and had arguments over whose turn it was on the trampoline. He was my partner-in-crime for every made-up game and every silly secret. Somewhere in between losing baby teeth and growing taller, he became my person.

Of course, we didn’t know it was love back then. It was just easy. Natural. Like breathing.

High school brought changes — new friends, different interests, crushes that came and went. But somehow, we never drifted. We always found each other at the lockers, during late-night walks when everything else felt heavy, or when no one else quite got what we were feeling.

The first time he held my hand, we were seventeen. It was winter, and we were walking home from a late movie, our breaths puffing in the cold. He didn’t make a big deal out of it. Just reached down, fingers brushing mine, and suddenly — there we were.

It was the simplest thing in the world.

And maybe that’s what love is, really. Not fireworks or grand gestures, but a quiet knowing. A comfort. A history built in inside jokes, shared playlists, and years of showing up.

We’re older now — life’s busier, messier, more real — but sometimes when we’re doing something as ordinary as folding laundry or cooking dinner, I look at him and think, How lucky am I that I get to love my best friend?

And I hope, for whoever’s reading this, that you get to know that kind of love too. The kind that grows slowly, patiently — rooted in friendship, watered by time, and blooming right when you least expect it.