Like I said, I never have faith but I always have hope.

But today there was a whisper in my ear that told me to have faith in us. It was really telling me to get any, it was just letting me know that I already had it.

Not that I feel much better, but I have faith. And you know I have hope. But hope is for the future and faith is for the present.

I'm sorry for making you feel inadequate. But it's not the things that you're not. It's the things that you are that make me cry. But it's also those things that make me laugh, and it's those things that make me happier than anything else in the world.

You know me very well. I do feel like you stopped loving me. I feel like you traded me in for something better. And I don't blame you. But you are too worried about being seen as a liar and because you're so preoccupied with trying not to lie, you end up lying anyway, only it's to yourself.

I'm not the only one who said things in New Orleans. And the things you said are the ones that upset me most, that make me cry the most, because I don't know what they mean and I don't know what to do with them. They make me cry because I can't ask you what they mean because you don't know. So now I feel like I'm lying and it's not just to you or me.

But I know you love me. And I know that's not a lie. Even though I say I love a lot of things all the time, there are only a few things that I'm really serious about. Not that I know what love is. But I know what it's not, and that might count for something.

Well, you know me. And you know that my best friend is the person I love the most. And you know who you are in that equation. I've lost the others but they weren't real. The thing that hurts the most is that you are and I hope you always are. For once, I have faith in the fact that you always will be.

It's just been annoying lately because some people don't understand that my priorities are different than most. They don't understand that there are really different kinds of love and that sometimes they can be just as intense and mean just as much or more than another.

You talk about people hearing "love" and hearing what they feel it means and not what you feel it means. So here's what I mean when I say it to you:

Who you are, as a person, makes my world that much brighter. Even the things that I can't stand about you, because I love all of you. I hate using a word in the definition of itself, but this is going to be one of those times.

I love the way we work together, the way we understand each other, and the way you run after me and have made me stop running for once in my life. I love the way, most of all, I can put as much into something and get it all back in return and it's not a chore and it's not a favor. It's just gratitude and enjoyment. I love the way we're opposite ends of the same spectrum and how, through all of it, I never once got the feeling that it was over.

But what I felt like was that you felt that, too, or your equivalent and that it still wasn't enough. You know that all I ever wanted and all I ever needed was a Friend. And I finally found it in you and I didn't measure up. I never understood and I don't think I will. But you don't need anyone or want anyone. At least not in the same way as I do.

It doesn't matter as long as we're there for each other. Through all of it. "All of it" being whatever life throws at us. Most of all, though, I love the way you taught me that I could be happy standing all by myself. No one else taught me that. No one else dragged me there. And that's precisely why I don't want to lose you, because even though I can (like you said), why should I have to and why should I make myself?

So I'll be there for you after all the other friends come and go, and after all the lovers, too. I hope. I hope I'll be there. And I hope you're there for me to go to each time I get my heart broken and each time it gets rebuilt. And I hope the distance between is never very far, spiritually or otherwise. Like you said, I don't think we could be. Because the connection is indestructable. And it can bend like I feel it bending now, but it won't break.

At least not for good.