3 years ago, I was asked who influenced me most as a writer. At that time, I really had no true idea. I thought of the few books I’d read and the even fewer I’d actually liked. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and collections of poems written by Langston Hughes popped in my mind. While racism seemed the main character in most black writers’ work Zora had written a love and self-love story about characters who happened to be black. Langston’s works were written in everyday language about working-class black folks. I could understand and ponder each without going cross-eyed and needing to keep a dictionary handy. This was a big plus for me.

That year, I was offered the opportunity to present the two influences on my own work and goals, both literary and children’s based for a Black History Series at Michigan State University. I honestly hadn’t even delved deeply into who the authors were as people or even read all of their work. But having to do the presentation changed everything for me. Preparing for the presentation required me to do a lot of research to find more depth on their influence. The more I researched, the more I fell in love with Zora particularly. It wasn’t so much her literary works that knocked me off my feet, but her actual life.

Now I should share that I’m no lover of history. It’s probably the storyteller in me, but I need storylines with emotions and character arcs, settings I can visualize, etc. History is fact-based with the people seeming more as monuments of notable accomplishments than humans with actual life struggles, friendships, love affairs, self-doubt and all the other things we experience in our humanness. History has always been rather discouraging to me without a palpable person to relate to, flaws and all.

But then I ‘met’ Zora. Unlike many other people in history, she corresponded with letters throughout her active years from start to finish. There is a back story that provides context to her life milestones, events, personal relationships and accomplishments in her own words. It’s powerful in a similar way that social media is because it gives an intimate view into her real-life with emotion, struggles, beliefs, desires and even typos that prove great writers are rarely great editors or typists, which is a personal struggle of mine. Taking it a step further than social media, I’m confident that Zora would never imagine people, like me, pouring over her letters in search of making her even more authentic than even social media today. Reading huge collections about her life and then one with over 600 letters written by her, changed me for the better on a personal level as well as a creative level. It gave me the courage to fully commit to my life’s purpose not waiting for wealth, validation or others to understand completely what I am trying to accomplish. I’ve lived more audaciously in these last few years since finding Zora than I ever have. I think knowing her life could truly help the masses who seek to leave behind a legacy filled with purpose.

Here are a few facts about Zora Neale Hurston in an effort to pique your interest:

Zora was born in 1891 and had the unique privilege of growing up in the first incorporated black municipality in the US-Eatonville, FL. And her father was the mayor of that town 3 times, writing town laws that still exist today. Eatonville is the most popular setting in her books and many of her characters are based on fellow citizens she knew. Life in Eatonville informed Zora’s controversial political beliefs such as opposing Brown vs. Board (1954).

When her mother, who supported her precocious personality, died when she was 13 life became difficult. Her father remarried, while she was sent away to boarding school. When Zora had a violent encounter with her young stepmother, her father stopped supporting her. She was left to fend for herself, struggling to complete school and find stable housing which she never did in her life. Despite life’s challenges, Zora would go on to attend Howard University after lying about her age to be able to complete high school at Morgan Academy for free. She’d join Zeta Phi Beta at Howard and join the literary community gaining the attention of Alain Locke through the Stylus, a competitive student literary magazine, and attending artist gatherings.

Life would begin to look up in the mid-1920s when she would move to New York and submit short stories to The Crisis Magazine National competitions started by Charles S. Johnson of the National Urban League. Zora would win several awards and become a name to know in the literary community from then on. She’d gain the attention of big names like author Fannie Hurst, Anne Nathan Meyer and other white patrons of the arts such as Charlotte Osgood Mason who would become the benefactor for Zora, Langston, and artist Miguel Covarrubias.

Hurst and Meyer would help Zora get into Barnard College, the all-woman counterpart to Columbia University. Zora would be given a scholarship and assistance to find jobs to assist her with the requirements of living. She’d be the only black student on the entire campus and have the opportunity to road trip with Hurst which was an uncommon interracial experience at the time. Ever the standout, Zora would be brought to the attention of Franz Boas, the father of Anthropology, during her time at Barnard.

In 1928, Zora would graduate from Barnard fully enthralled in the world of Anthropology. But true to her personality, Zora would have to put her spin on it. At a time when Negros and their lives were recorded by anthropologists to support stereotypes, Zora would change that. She’d travel throughout the south, Nassau, Jamaica, Haiti and Honduras documenting the life of ‘primitives’ and their culture collecting songs, children’s games, traditions and more. Zora was a credentialed scientist and apprentice of Boas. She gave herself to her work, fully immersing in the lives and cultures of the people she studied. Her commitment was so serious that she even studied and became a voodoo priestess.

I was astounded that Zora did all of these things during the Harlem Renaissance at the height of Jim Crow and pervasive gender role inequality. Traveling and researching was Zora’s attempt to preserve the traditions of those in the African Diaspora and even the Indians of Honduras. When the hieroglyphics, technology, and astronomy of the ancient civilizations in Honduras hadn’t been tapped into yet, Zora traveled to Honduras to begin documenting it all with foresight that wouldn’t become fully unmasked until the 1970s-three decades after she took her expedition.

One could find the wonder in the way Zora studied and researched her subjects, contending with the most regarded anthropologist and serving as a pioneer for the appreciation of black culture. I was struck by reading her many letters to her patron who censored and limited Zora’s ability to reach her fullest potential, her friends, family, organizations that might fund her and figureheads who opposed her unjustly. In addition, reading her plans for her work, her aspirations (many of which went unaccomplished) and her love affairs, which she was notoriously private about, and even her reactions to criticisms of her and her work inspired me to no end.

Zora was an absolute genius fluidly moving through life as a scientist, playwright, director, folklorist, novelist, and one of the first filmmakers. Her unique perspective weaved a web in which she used her research for her art and her art to fuel further interest in her research.

But one might wrongfully assume that with all these accomplishments, that Zora was wealthy. She was not. In fact, Zora died on welfare as a ward of the State of Florida with an unmarked grave and all of her works (4 novels and 2 collections of folklore) out of print. When one reads her own words and her continual striving to do more work until her dying day, an understanding is born. Zora never made over $944 dollars in royalties for her books and struggled continually to make a living for herself, especially with her most publications taking place during the Great Depression. On top of that, she was notoriously private, often taking pride in even her own family not knowing when she was ill.

Polarizing, controversial, misunderstood, victimized and plagued by race and gender, even when she resisted this truth, Zora’s story has all the makings of many great works of fiction. Only it doesn’t have to be fiction at all because her life can be read in her own words to add vivid color to the facts about her presented on a historical and scholarly level. Zora gives us an intimate and true opportunity to know her and make up our minds for ourselves through all of her contradictions, complexity, and humanness. And even if we still don’t understand, we can relate to and appreciate a life that was lived with a determination to leave behind a legacy no matter the circumstances.

As for me, after discovering the souring of the best friend relationship between Langston and Zora, which I had not known about previously, I found myself entranced with Zora and the forces that shaped her life. I’ve read over 2500 pages on Zora, correspondence she wrote and her work-more than on any other subject. I present at the same Black History Series at Michigan State University annually and am expanding to other organizations and universities. When I present Zora, it is my goal that attendees leave with a new curiosity and appreciation for her life. And hopefully, a few even begin their journey into loving Zora: the gun-toting, cigarette smoking, enthralling storyteller who contributed to science and culture, in many ways known and unknown, who was a woman fighting to be an individual beyond race and gender, who chose her life’s purpose over marriage and who was certainly before her time.

Zora’s legacy is always being reshaped and compounded as new work and treasures are being found regularly. I’d like to thank the Zoraphile’s such as Valerie Boyd and Carla Kaplan who labored tirelessly to bring Zora to us in her own words. I’d like to thank the incomparable Alice Walker who brought Zora back to life after reading Robert Hemenway’s biography on her and feeling compelled to find her unmarked grave leading to a resurgence of the Queen of the Harlem Renaissance. To Robert Hemenway who made Zora human first in his autobiography. To Kathleen McGhee- Anderson who brought us Jump at the Sun, documentary bringing Zora’s story to life on film. Henry Louis Gates Jr. who has been a great gift by among other things being the first to collect Zora’s stories for contemporary readers and efforts to make black periodicals accessible to scholars in the Black Literature Index, which held 6 unpublished short stories that caused us all to re-examine Zora’s legacy as a southern writer. And lastly, to my sister who was an avid reader with a bookshelf that held Zora’s works. I stole Their Eyes Were Watching God off of your shelf and the seed that would become my love of Zora began.

I wonder what my Mom thinks about when she does the dishes. I wonder about this a lot. Does she think about my Dad and how the Chicago Tribune once described him as, “tall, boyish” and a prophet-like builder? Are her memories of their life together like mine; flashes and vignetted moments of birthdays and bikes in the driveway and green floorboards?

Or does she think about how he gave up their marriage and his insipid slew of girlfriends that followed her faithful, fated act? I wonder if she wishes she had had us take our shoes off in the house, or if she is glad she didn’t, because what a waste of time.

I wonder if she thinks about her mother the way I think about her — her long, discreetly contorted fingers and inky hair and the asymptote-like lines of her knees. Does she long to live time backwards, so that she may know her Mom as she grows younger and stronger, not older and slightly disinclined? Does she wonder about insects? Does she wonder about cantaloupes? Does she wonder about dying?

I am certain she thinks about how true the adage, “whoever said ‘easy like Sunday morning’ obviously never had to get children ready for church,” was for her and the darker, doggier days of the late ’90s. In that right, does she remember my days as an acolyte as vividly as I do?

Does she think about God? Does she ever try to talk to him as her hands mindlessly submerge themselves into warm, soapy water that smells of artificial lemon, sage and a little like formaldehyde? Does she remember the swollen stings from the day she stepped on a ground-nesting wasp gallery?

Because that is just the sort of thing, had it happened to me, that I would think of with self-absorbed pity every other day. And it is exactly the sort of thing that she would never bother to think of at all. 

She must think about the day with the fur coat and the burnt orange hat and the metal slide. I wasn’t born yet; I would not be born for 23 more years… but there is a photograph somewhere of that day that her best friend took and it is so striking and so seemingly familiar that I think I remember it, almost as if I was there.

And maybe I was. I wonder if she thinks I was with her all along. I wonder if she thinks of my great grandmother and if she remembers the sound it made when you’d sit on the vintage retro diner chairs in her modest foyer, and the feeling you got when you looked out through the lacy drapes to the concrete lawn ornament of Virgin Mary. I wonder if she knows that I used to think that if I sat there long enough, Mary might talk to me and I used to bet that if she talked to anyone, it was my mother.

I imagine she thinks about Paris and juniper berries and the beetle shell replica she handmade the year I decided I wanted to be a ladybug for Halloween. 

Does she think of that terrible chicken crouton casserole she made once for dinner?
Does she remember her periwinkle sweater?
Does she wonder whether or not it would be as thrilling as it seems it might be to tell certain strangers, particularly women, who interrupt the peace in cafes and bookstores and antique shops — with their softening earlobes and whiny voices spewing words like “awfully” and, “my husband Thomas,” to shut the fuck up?
Does she think about the fact that through all of her conspicuous ethnicity, a blonde-haired, green-eyed, second daughter with fluorescent, fair skin was born unto her?
Does she marvel at how that could be?
Does she think about our Christmas stockings and the red toolbox and does she remember the pattern of the carpet in our house the year I turned 13?

I’ll bet she makes lists. Stuff about her checkbook and finding the missing dryer ball and buying eggs; calling Lynn; needing more toothpaste — the white paste, never the blue or green gel.

Less tactical lists, too. Remember to fight the urge to clean the kitchen when I visit my daughter as it so violently offends her. Practice more compassion when my other daughter calls pathetically whimpering about her broken heart and the man who is incarnate of what it feels like to fail as a parent.

Have more patience. Be more capable. Stop eating bread. Don’t stop eating bread because bread makes motherhood and womanhood and humanity seem slightly more manageable and the right to go soft in the middle like yeast, is earned.

I imagine lists of places she has been and places she might like to go but probably won’t and places she would like to go and just might… as well as places she does not want to see ever again but probably will (like the inside of another laundromat, the inside of another emergency room, the view of the world from down on your knees on an icy sidewalk outside of an Admiral gas station). 

I hope she doesn’t think too much about the things she would probably say were her mistakes; or of the things she would probably say were her regrets.

I hope she only remembers trying to catch dragonflies off the dock and the long naps we would take and of the yellow tulips. I hope she thinks about the piano, the Latin Quarter and how fun it would be if her job was to name all the different shades of nail polish and hair dye and colors in a drop of sun-kissed rain.

I wonder if she thinks about how much I think about her. I imagine she thinks about me. My crooked toes, my almond eyes, the small mole in the center of my neck.
I imagine she thinks about my sister. Her collarbone, the gait of her walk, the birthmark on her thigh. Does she think about how inexplicable it is that we are here?

That we exist to think about only because she grew us, warm and strong, from her? Does she think about how impossible it seems that we might have to exist in a world that she does not? 

Does she think she is happy? Does she feel she is loved? Does she wonder what I wonder? I wonder what my Mom thinks about when she does the dishes.

What if my child woke up one day and said: “This is the last boundary of mine you will ever cross.” Would I die of a broken heart? I

I woke up on vacation in Lake Tahoe with my husband and told him to drive us home early so I could sever business ties with my father and finally go no contact with my mother. This wouldn’t just require a blocked number and email address, it would require the complete upheaval of my family foundation, my financial security, and my foreseeable future. I had nothing but the support of my husband, a patchy resume, and an embarrassing amount of credit card debt accumulated trying to make ends meet while simultaneously starting a business. None of those things mattered to me anymore. I wanted out. I had been validated too many times by too many professionals. This was a toxic nightmare that I had been gaslit into believing was the “dream” mother-daughter dynamic. 

My whole life my mother told me I was her best friend. She devoted all of her energy to me, my social life, and my friends. I grew up in a zero boundary household. I remember being jealous of my friends that had secrets. I remember reading books about rich, Upper East Side teenagers and thinking about how lucky they were that their parents left them alone. My mom was everywhere; at home, at school, and after 2006, constantly blowing up my cell phone. She was the front office secretary, then a teacher at my school, and coincidentally started teaching seventh grade just as my older brother entered the seventh grade. She knew everything about everyone we were close to and relayed gossip back to me and my brother long before it ever reached us through the chain of our classmates. My mom knew every bad thing that was said about me, and she reveled in telling me as if she was giving me constructive criticism. “We tell each other everything, right?” I never knew I had another option. 

The first real red flag and one that even registered to me at the time was my mother’s relationship with my middle school boyfriend. She seemed to be competing with me for his attention, always noting that after I was too tired to talk on the phone any longer, he would call and talk to her into the wee hours of the morning. This went on well into my high school years and long after we had broken up. She hated every other boy I dated because she couldn’t get information from them. Dating older boys became almost a habit out of self-preservation. I never wanted to date anyone that was ever in my mom’s class. I couldn’t risk that connection being made again and used against me. She would tell me all the locker room talk that was said about me, none of which was true, yet she was in a constant state of suspicion that I was some sort of sexual deviant. My curfew was never consistent with anything but her preferences of who I was with. Years later, when I questioned the appropriateness of their relationship, she told me I was disgusting for even suggesting anything. She had even raised questions with her administrators several times before for how much extra time the boys spent in her classroom. Even then, she never had the self-awareness to stop and admit that her behavior might be inappropriate. 

When I did lose my virginity in high school, she broke down and told me how devastated my old boyfriend would be because he always thought he would be my first. I guess that’s what she had planned as well. I remember being so stunned that her initial reaction was to go tell my seventh-grade boyfriend, that I said nothing. Even this experience wasn’t my own. The only reason I told her was that I knew it would get around to her via my ex anyway, and I wanted to avoid the backlash of her thinking I had a secret. It might be almost laughable if it wasn’t a complete invasion of my privacy. My sexual activity was hers to talk about and respecting a boundary as a mother or respecting my privacy as a human was never even a consideration.

The second red flag of note was the juxtaposition between Private Mom and Public Mom. She paraded me around like her prized pony, laughing joyously when I painfully referred to myself as her dancing monkey to her friends. I thought I had to perform. I thought I had to be funny to make up for my personality that she had made clear was a real obstacle for her. 

Cold, unforgiving, alienating, harsh, bitch. 

Ice Queen. 

This is how my mom would describe me to me.

“That’s why no one in your grade likes you. You alienate everyone.” 

However, she would describe me to her friends as “quirky, eccentric, an old soul”. My identity felt like two massively contradicting sides for the first twenty-five years of my life because of this. My boldness and my irreverent sense of humor were always praised in public, yet any act of defiance to her will meant punishment until I made myself small enough to meet her comfort level. She never did this outwardly or within earshot of anyone whose opinion mattered to her. She would merely undermine my thoughts by planting any seed of doubt that she could. “Should you be doing that? Do you regret that? Do you miss this?” 

The day I realized this was the day I began to understand a generational pattern that was stopped dead in its tracks by me. Here was this grown woman so destabilized by a bold little girl that she would preach guilt and shame to her as gospel just to try to get her to shrink to the size the world had scared her into. I loved her so much, trusted her completely, it never occurred to me before that she quite possibly didn’t know better.

Wrestling with that thought was nearly impossible with my father around. He was ready to defend and justify her behavior at all costs. What is a kid supposed to do when no one is in their corner? They’re telling me they’re in my corner, that this is normal, that she’s allowed, entitled even, to treat me like this, that this is a learned behavior from her mother that we should let slide, but somehow I’m in the wrong? I was constantly told to consider her feelings, but never my own.

 “Don’t be like that.” “You don’t feel that way.” “Don’t be that way.” “You don’t think that.”

 I didn’t even know what gaslighting was until I was twenty-five. I had no idea I had been such a regular recipient. 

Then came the alcoholism. The dirty little secret. The secret that I was the “only person that could know or understand”. Suddenly, I had an entirely new list of responsibilities. The roles switched entirely, and it wasn’t lost on either of us. My mom was constantly praising me for my maturity, how I gave such good advice, and for being such a great daughter. I was always there, but not like a daughter, like a parent. My mental health was suffering because I still needed a mother myself, but somehow I had become one. My dad never noticed the drinking and to this day remains in complete denial about it, so this was solely on me. In the South, it kind of looks like everyone has a drinking problem, so you have to work harder to spot the real drunks. Even telling my dad about the night she picked me up from the airport wasted and almost drove us into a guard rail didn’t seem to sink in as a real threat to him. 

I graduated high school at sixteen, for good reason. I spent most of my twenties being completely lost and sick and questioning my sanity. I had so much anger and resentment built up, but no real indication of where it was coming from. Things went from bad to worse the year my maternal grandmother passed away and I got engaged to a longtime friend turned whirlwind romance. I don’t know what I expected when I got engaged, but it certainly wasn’t my mother’s daily slut-shaming for spending the night with my fiancé instead of spending every waking moment I was in town with her. I didn’t expect to be called delusional during the happiest time of my life. I didn’t expect to be berated for wanting to have a semblance of personal life, a personal life I had never allowed myself because I was too busy trying to succeed. She screamed at me for not involving her, as if I was intentionally withholding her from this experience she was owed. In truth, it was such a small wedding, it didn’t take much planning and we just wanted everyone to show up and have a great time. She insisted on being in charge of dessert, which she chose, and then proceeded to get too drunk to replenish throughout the night, so about 90% went to the megachurch of the pastor that completely botched my grandmother’s eulogy. My mother made me cry more in the two weeks that led up to my wedding than any boy that had ever broken my heart. Her friends harassed me about my fiancé and treated my wedding like a joke. One of her friends even insisted I change the date to accommodate her tennis party. Not a single aspect of that day was about me. It was all just “happening” to my mother. 

The pattern became so blatantly obvious, my adult brain simply couldn’t deny it any longer. Every conversation we had was something negative about someone else, and there was very little hope to lead the topic in a different direction. Bad plastic surgery, weight gain, failing marriages, etcetera. She talked badly about my dad to me, which I begged her not to do repeatedly. I would get off the phone completely drained. She demanded access at all hours, no matter where in the world I was, and it was all negative. It felt like she loved when bad things happened to people, including me. She constantly tried to summon them into fruition, bring up old hurts, salt any wound she could find so she could be the “concerned parent”, so she could feel “needed”. It was exhausting. It was emotional labor. If I didn’t oblige, which became increasingly difficult as I got older, the punishment was relentless. It could be anything; I was on a hike with my husband and couldn’t text back or I hadn’t called in the appropriate amount of time since our last talk. The texts would come in like rapid-fire before I even had time to react to the previous one. Total character assassination, absolutely anything to get a reaction out of me. Unfortunately, I learned this too late. I always reacted because I loved her and wanted her to understand my emotions. I just didn’t understand that she couldn’t. She would immediately turn my desperate pleas to be understood into the usual, and might I say tired, list of character flaws I had, and oh did I mention she was the victim of an attack now? 

“I can’t talk to you about anything. It’s like I have to walk on eggshells all the time. You’re impossible. I never treated my mother so horribly.” 

An incredibly memorable epiphany occurred on the day she told me I was just like my dad’s “greedy” estranged brother and I was just “leeching off” of my parents. This statement got me to wise up to a very ugly truth I did not want to face. My dad had been using his support as access and my mom had been using it as ammunition for guilt. All my life, I had been reminded of how difficult it would be for me and my brother to take care of ourselves because we’re both creative types. I grew up believing this economy just wasn’t made for me to thrive in. So, I did what I thought I had to do to pay back my parents for all their years of investment into my future. I made my whole life about paying them back. I went into business with my dad. I felt so guilty about how much they had helped me, that I let them walk all over both me and my husband because they picked up the check. The gentle nudges turned into a blatant disregard for our wishes and our boundaries, and just like in my childhood, the boundaries completely melted away. This became glaringly clear to me once my parents started inviting guests to stay at our house while we were out of town, without telling us, after we asked them to pet sit our very anxious dog. The response to that boundary was ‘You’re being ridiculous. It’s not a big deal. I can’t believe you’re making this such a big deal. Maybe we need to rethink our situation.” 

That’s when I realized, this was not love. It was control.

I can still recall my blood pressure that day. I can still hear the ringing in my ears as my hands shook and sweat as I aired my grievances. She tried to guilt-trip me up until the second before I blocked her number. It was the first time I had called her behavior exactly what it was, abuse. I said, “I am blocking your number so you cannot continue to abuse me.” I never felt more sure of anything in my life. It felt like I had just landed on the moon and shoved that American flag into the rocky surface. I knew in my bones that this was decades of emotional abuse, manifested as illnesses, mental breakdowns, and finally a complete reckoning, coming to a halt. I was the only person that had the power to break the cycle, so I did.

A wise person once said that the only people that get upset about boundaries are the ones who benefit from you having none.

 I’m sure many people would read this and be completely horrified that anyone could ever turn their back on family, and I used to be one of those people too. At what point in your development do you get to decide that perhaps your guardians don’t have all the answers and maybe they don’t have your best interest at heart? Maybe they just have their best interests at heart. You don’t. Our society doesn’t allow that distinction to be made without consequences. I’m just going to say the thing you’re not supposed to say, and that’s any ole idiot can have a kid. You’re not entitled to someone’s life because you gave them one against their will. I know, I know that sounds so crass and just like something someone without kids would say, but hear me out. Do you trust that every elder in your life has the self-awareness and empathy to not project their past traumas onto you solely based on their age and relation to you? Our emotions exist to guide us. Isn’t it possible that they could guide us in the opposite direction of the people who raised us and it not be a tragic estrangement, but rather a necessary distancing? 

I’ve researched myself into a hole of covert narcissism, emotional abuse, toxic family dynamics, enabling fathers, etcetera. My goal is no longer a diagnosis. My only goal is peace, and I am well on my way. Everything I’ve learned, all the data I toyed with cramming into this article might validate something deep inside you that you have felt ashamed of for years, but it’s also not necessary. I knew. I always knew something was wrong. Even as a little kid, I knew that my mother wasn’t supposed to make me feel like I was difficult to love. I was just taught not to trust myself. Trust your instincts above all else. Your nervous system will fail you in an attempt to get you the f* out, and it is up to you to listen. It hurts, it is not easy, it is like an assassination of your identity and everything you thought you valued. It is also entirely worth it. Do not betray yourself. Other people’s toxic behavioral patterns are not your responsibility. Boundaries are your birthright. 

My dearest babe. Tonight after we spoke, I sat on the floor and meditated to clear my mind. I couldn’t stop the tears that fell onto my legs as I sat and rekindled my feelings for you. The comfort of your voice, you telling me “you’re gonna be alright” always mends my broken heart. There’s something about your voice that gives me the comfort I need.

I cry with my heart broken that’s in a million pieces thinking about what we’ve been through. All the best days of the last five years will somehow, some way, hold a big piece of my heart. No matter what happens, I will love you like no other.   

I wanted to be that person to watch you eat dinner every night and listen to you tell me how good the food was. I wanted to watch you nap from an exhausting day of work. You sacrificed so much to be with me. Accepted so many things just to be with me. Someone who was older, much older, and someone who has kids. You learned to accept and accustomed yourself to deal with me when I get crazy and always came through to make me happy in the end.

All the times you wanted to leave, I never stopped fighting for you. Even though at times it seemed unbearable for you to continue on with us. You stayed. I forever will love you for not abandoning me when I needed you most. 

Even though you were still growing yourself, you somehow always had the ability to calm me down and fix everything. You put your own feelings aside and put your social life on the back burner to learn and grow with me. Even through the turbulent times, you ended up crawling into bed to sleep next to me.

I’ve learned so many things from you. I’ve never been with someone who makes me laugh as much as you. You taught me what a real relationship was by having pillow talks with me before we went to bed. Age really is nothing but a number. To be with someone like you, with an old soul, has opened my eyes to a new level. Never in my lifetime thus far that I haven’t had met someone like you.

You taught me a gazillion things about many things and shared your curiosity and passion, especially all things animal. That’s when you know deep down inside no matter how “rough around the edges” someone can be, they have a big heart. 

I’ll never forget the night of the wedding, standing out in the rain in the parking lot with you. All of our ninja nights and many close calls… once in a lifetime that a person can go through such adventures. You are the one I got to share that with. I’m so happy that it was you. 

I wish life had a more simpler game plan. I love you babe so much. ‘Til the day I leave this lifetime… I’ll remember you forever.