A letter from June 16th, 2020

To my dearest William Henry, I briefly considered rickrolling you with this letter, however, I have already done that so I should probably come up with another idea. Watch out for that e-mail (or maybe it’s already arrived, I haven’t decided yet). Happy birthday. We have now been friends for over ten YEARS now, representing a longer period of time having known each other than not. By the end of my life (which also assumes you also make it to 82), I will have known you for almost seventy years. It’s hard for me to imagine that expanse of time at twenty and I don’t think it will be any easier for me to conceptualize at twenty five either. In those seventy years, I hope that we remain constants for each other. For me, you are my first true love. In that statement, there used to be some romantic nuance, but as I’m writing this and hopefully as you are reading this, you are the first person I gave all my platonic love to. We don’t talk on the phone everyday because I don’t have to talk on the phone everyday to you. Everything about you is familiar to me, from the way you laugh and the way that action lights up your eyes to the way you finagle with a guitar, even if you don’t have a physical instrument. I love you to the moon and back and then a thousand times more. I almost added a phrase to explain why I love you that much, but I don’t need to do that. You already know why I love you that much. I have absolutely no need to give you an explanation why I continue to consider you my closest and most dear friend. You are a special person, Will. I’m not the only one who thinks that. I think your best quality is that you listen to people. I value that you allow me to talk endlessly and I don’t have to worry about you needing to interrupt me. You listen. I think that’s a rare quality. You speak with intention and thought. Although at times you have blurry edges, to me, that doesn’t matter. You are so sure of who you are at your core being. I cannot emphasize how lucky I am that I decided to be friends with you. When we were twelve, we didn’t know that a simple mistake of two sheets of graph paper instead of just one or even none at all would lead to the hour long marathon phone calls of our late teen years bleeding into our early twenties. If by the time you receive this, I have moved abroad or if we still live in different time zones, I sincerely hope that we still make that kind of time for talking about the world. Will, I love you to the moon and back plus a thousand times over and I would not trade the nearly seventy percent of my life I plan to stay friends with you for anything in the world. If I haven’t called you within the past 72 hours, please call me when you get this. I probably miss you a lot. To the moon and back, Jillian Emily Also watch this: https://youtu.be/PBNsUQd5AOA I think you’ll enjoy it