If you're Dean, I guess that makes me Rory. And I'd rather we both be Lorelei.

I cannot begin to imagine it.

 Being faced with such choices.

 Being faced with such a year.

 I barely made it through mine and, let's be frank, comparatively I've had it easy. And I understand, I do, where all the silence comes from. The purpose of it. The need for it, even. But the growth and/or revelations borne of that silence, necessary and important as they may be, do not make it any less lonely or less strange. I understand that our friendship --in it's current state-- is sort of unapproachably overwrought with complexity. A knot too quarrelous and confounding to even begin to untie. But. Here I am, anyway. Planting the seeds of understanding. Of readiness. I look forward to the day we will be able to have our first honest conversation about it. Neither of us hiding behind silence or poetry, respectively. And our first honest conversation not only with each other, but with ourselves.

 If you want to know the truth, there is some level on which we both had to kind of know it was a fantasy. A shared delusion. This sort of thing never ends well. Honestly we're lucky that in the end we didn't hurt anyone but ourselves. And we'll get over it. We got to live, however briefly, in a world with a different history and a more perfect tomorrow. And I loved it. I will cherish it always, our days of future past. All of the wonderful possibilities we shared in our imaginings. At best, at the very best, it was an alternate reality idyll. At worst, I still got a magnificently strange cat.

 I know that you have made your choices, as I have made mine. And I recognize that maybe you might have had some different choices to make if I had made mine differently. If I had truly moved home. And the character I was sort of being maybe might have. An undeniable element of this whole thing was the sort of fast forward timeslip you were shunted into the day you said your vows, and the missing conclusion to your early twenties. The age of heedless folly and capricious romance. And I believe it was, in some sense, a reclamation or a completion of these lost years that led to our brief but precious days. One last halcyon phosphorous flame, but to cauterize rather than to kindle. And so our characters, our lost-past alternate-timeline selves, may have been able to run off into this ideal and optimistic new life together. But I didn't move home and you didn't move out. Because we're old enough to know better. To make the adult decisions. To honor our responsibilities and our commitments and the other trappings of the cages we have placed ourselves in for safety and sanity and survival. But we got --just for a little while-- to be free of them. It was foolish and it was selfish and it was pretending towards a fiction. But a fiction made no less magical by that admission.

 It was what it was and we had what we had. And the decisions we have made and the worlds we have chosen to live in dictate that it must now be over for all time. And even within the bounds of that understanding, I will still cherish it always. But cherish it for what it was. All that being said, though preciousness immeasurable, it was not the weightless happiness of our passions that bolstered me during my father's sickness, with struggling with living so far away, with my various heartbreaks and tragedies and all my minute and dismissible bothers. It was the immovable pillar that is, has been, and will ever be our friendship. Romantic love is a flash in the proverbial pan compared to the strength that we have been to one another over the last decade. And I cannot lose that. I will not. There simply aren't that many people I like well enough to maintain a friendship with for ten years. I can count on fewer fingers those who make that list. You are one of my closest, important, and most cherished friends.

 The truth is that I can probably go on living without you in my life.  But no sane person would ever want to, and I refuse to accept it as even a possibility. I mean it's also technically possible to live your entire life without ever eating a pizza, but I would argue that it pretty severely diminishes the experience of living.

So come on. I'm ready whenever you are. Let's work out how to be Gilmore Girls again.

 I Love you.