I figure most of you won't want to read this sort of stuff, so I'll spare you the ordeal and put a read-more on this.
I first encountered Mel almost a year ago. I'm still not sure when or where, it was either Twitter or Tumblr, I'm not sure.
The first time I went from actually just following her posts to actually talking to her, she'd posted something really emotional and rather distressing (I can't exactly recall the nature of the original post, and I'm not prepared to trawl through about a year's worth of stuff to go and find it), and I sent her a message and told her that she had my support and if she needed to talk to anyone about it, I was there. I thought nothing of it at the time, I was just being nice and didn't want to see anyone down in the dumps for whatever reason. And nothing happened of it at the time. A few months later, and a few conversations, we became friends. Another few months, we became more.
I didn't exactly plan for it to happen this way. I think. But I'm glad it did. Because really, I've missed this crazy feeling. The one that keeps me up until 6am in the morning just so we can talk. The one that, even after all that time being awake, I still can't sleep because I can't stop thinking about her. The one where nearly every moment of every day, all I want's for her to be there with me.
But she can't be.
Because she lives about 5500 miles away in San Diego.
It's tough, sometimes, having to come to terms with this fact, despite texting and IMing pretty much on a daily basis. It makes her seem like she's just up the road a few minutes when she's just on the other side of a phone or a computer, no different to any of my old college classmates or my drinking buddies. Which makes the down days even worse. Because there's nothing more awful than when one of us is having a totally shit day, and neither of us can be there for each other.
But we make it happen. A lot of it's due to the fact that it requires so little effort for us to talk and make each other happy. It sounds really bad when I say it like that, but given that we're both usually pretty shy and reserved people when it comes to actually talking to someone as opposed to just throwing words against a wall and seeing what sticks.
But most of it's because we like each other for who we are. We became friends through mutual interests and friends, and we took the chance to get to know each other a bit more beyond that before we decided to make the decision to make a go of it. So in effect, it's just a lot like just falling for your best friend.
Mel's great though. She cares a lot, she's funny, she's into the same stuff that I am (and she's really cute, too). I'm lucky to have her in my life in any capacity at all, let alone as my girlfriend.
So happy Valentine's Day, Mel. Hopefully it's the first of many we'll share together, and the first of very few we'll have to spend apart.
