This Is What I Want My Best Friend To Know Before She Gets Married

We met nine years ago and I didn’t know it at the time, but our friendship would end up being the very thing that would save me. I would come to find out through tough love and complete admiration that you, dear friend, would be able to pick me up off the floor not once, but multiple times.

It was in these moments that I would learn what it means to truly love another despite faults and disagreements. It’s something I have carried with me and no matter how our friendship grows from here I will continue to keep the lessons warm in my heart.

In the beginning years we had to learn to navigate our differences. With opposing signs and completely different upbringings, the stars would show that a budding friendship was not in the cards for us. But we ignored those signs because we knew our connection was strong enough to move past anything that stood in the way of our bound.

Through breakups, bad jobs, family drama, and terrible life choices we have both somehow landed on our feet unscathed. The only mathematical equation that has been easy for me to solve is how you plus me equals success. In the times we felt we were doomed we broke down the pieces bit by bit until we found a solution worthy of our goals and ambition. If it didn’t fit correctly we erased the board and started over until a new solution became clear. I am not confident the results would have been the same without you.

If figuring out the pieces to the puzzle of our lives was the goal in our twenties, we made the picture come together without the help of anyone else. Now we frame it proudly thanks to a series of years where we helped each other re-build our respective puzzles time and time again.

I often wonder where I would have ended up if you didn’t have my back. If you weren’t there to warn me of my impending bad decisions I’m not sure where I would have landed. If you didn’t offer an understanding as well as playing devils advocate, I’m not sure I would have grown the same way I have. And if you never supported my choices, regardless of how you felt personally, we wouldn’t be friends. In fact, we may have ended up as enemies instead.

The truth is, you often know me better than I know myself. Your constant reminder of who I was and who I am now brings to light a million tiny fragments of my life that are strung together as the great decade of my twenties. To know that the most pinnacle years of my life were spent with you brings happiness to my heart and constant reassurance that we were meant to be together as sisters, and the best of friends for what I can only hope lasts a lifetime.

Soon you will be married and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I’m afraid I won’t see you as often, or that I won’t be able to call on you whenever I need, or that my concerns will no longer be as valid as they once were. Then, I stop and realize these thoughts are irrational.

If anything were to change it’s because we let it, not because you are married to someone just as extraordinary as you are.

When I stand with you on your wedding day my heart will be filled with joy and sheer bliss. I’ll know that I held your hand as long as you needed me to in order to get to this point. I’ll look on with tears in my eyes as you make the promises you told me you wanted to provide another all those years ago, and my heart will fill with love.

And as the day turns into night at a speed in which we can’t grasp now, I will remind myself of all the moments we shared before getting here. Then, capture this new moment in a new chapter where adulthood takes over and our love for one another never fades.