While we were making dinner together on our first date, I confessed that I was nervous, in part because I knew that your ability to see me so clearly meant that you were capable of devastating me. Later on, we told each other that it was okay if we broke each other's hearts.

Have you ever given and received permission to ruin and be ruined? Maybe that's another way of asking if you have ever been in love, if you've ever handed over and been given the codes for mutually assured destruction. You told me that you'd write me a beautiful blog post if the worst happened, and then added that no, you'd write me one before that. I'm writing this because I want to beat you to it.

A few days after our first date, lying together in my bed and telling each other truths, I complimented your ability to notice, appreciate, and affirm me. You paused, said you were going to share something vulnerable, and then told me that you had a story that I hadn’t been loved thoroughly, and that you were going to get the new high score in loving me well.

There are few people that would have been able to notice that the way that I was complimenting them indicated that they were something new to me. There are even fewer people that would have been able to notice that and then have the guts to say it out loud to someone that they had only been seeing for three days. I wonder how much courage it took for you, and if you knew on some level that saying those words would only ever result in my being even more in awe of you.

I considered whether I'd ever been loved properly by those who I've dated in the past. I've certainly received heaps of sunshine and deep connection and love from partners, and enjoyed wonderful relationships that I still cherish. But there has always been something missing. I've never been with a person that has understood me sufficiently to love me as I'd like to be loved. There's always been a significant mismatch somewhere, whether it's been values, the places that made us feel the most at home, the ways that we most wanted to spend our days, or the communication styles that came most easily to us. That's not a critique of my previous partners; when you are different people that spend a lot of time existing in different worlds, it's hard to create an amazing one together.

But you and I seem to live in pretty similar ones. We like to help other people. We're intrigued by new things, and deeply okay enough to try them without being too held back. We're intensely emotional people that feel at home in many places, and we flirt with the boundary between weird as fuck and sufficiently good at emulating normality to exist happily in the regular world. We love easily and openly, and are comfortable in our skin. We're good at communicating with each other, and the world at large. We have lived different lives in foreign places very unlike the one we find ourselves in now. Barely two weeks after meeting each other, we're both comfortable saying things that seem way more intimate than "I love you".

After you told me that you were going to love me better than anyone has, I told you that I believed you, because I do, and that I think I will also love you more than you’ve ever been loved before. This is a small part of that. This is love as a verb.

My sister's brain was damaged by a case of meningitis, a swelling of the brain and spinal cord that came out of nowhere when she was eleven and I was nine.

When I was ten years old, I'd often lie awake late into the night, sweating, wondering if I'd notice if I had rabies, or maybe brain cancer, the plague, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or if I'd be able to tell the difference between the sound of the trains that ran on the tracks a quarter mile behind my house, and tornadoes, which sometimes share the same calling card, a low, rhythmic rumble that belies their potential to kill.

The meningitis that scarred Julie's brain started out as an innocuous case of strep throat, a normal sick day for a schoolchild, nothing more than a low rumble.

For her first eleven years, Julie was happy and healthy. She helped me learn my letters when I was a toddler, and then at age nine I watched as she herself learned to walk and talk again after her brush with death, a warped echo of our earlier years.

After, she struggled immensely. Epilepsy, with seizures about daily for years. Decreased short term memory abilities. Depression, bad. Wild mood swings. She was barely recognizable to me despite living in the same exterior as my sister. To my eyes, Julie was gone.

I was young and was slammed with one of the hardest truths of existence: that things change. That things I loved were not guaranteed to remain tomorrow. That anything and everything can be taken away at a moment's notice. So I stayed awake and worried about things that were deadly.

I've been grappling with this existential ephemerality, this cosmic unsafeness, for my whole life since then. I may lose anything at any time. I will lose everything eventually.

Recently, I have been meditating on the words of Jeff Foster, which I am mildly embarrassed to admit I found on one of those Instagram accounts dedicated to motivational quotes.

But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost.

When I was ten, I could only see that the ground was unstable, and I didn't know what might cause me or anything that I loved to plunge beneath it.

But time has a way of changing things. As the years passed and I've grown, I've slowly found the courage to remove my head from the sand and look around. I've noticed that there are still many things to be grateful for. And that when things go away, I still end up okay in the end. Maybe worse for the wear at first, but eventually the pain of losing gets kintsugi'd into me and I often end up even more beautiful than I was before.

Surely the sands will shift, and it's hard to tell when a tornado might come through and blow it all away. But for the moment, I feel the earth, solid under me. And I choose to dance on this holy ground.