L is for the way you look at me.

By accident, I ended up on Joe's Facebook page today. Naturally, this lead to a re-reading of every conversation we ever had on that social network. I read them backward, though, and it was strange. It's astounding how differently we talked to each other when things were starting. Backward, you'd think you were witnessing the formation of a friendship when you're really just rewinding the downfall of a relationship that never really was.

When we first found out we liked each other, we lost sleep for those pages of late-night text messages. I used to stay up late reading, my phone turned on high in case you had a nightmare and woke up at four like you sometimes did. You made me a playlist and called me Syfy, which I always thought was adorable. When we were trying to figure out where the other stood, we put so much effort into conversation. Our end was bland and dull. We met on the last day of September in 2011, and by the time fall of 2012 rolled around, you knew all of my favorite songs and mannerisms. I already knew where you were born and the way your voice sounded when you were tired.

I gathered only one thing from it, one single but one extremely important thing: friendship is necessary. When we met, we both knew what we were working toward: we were interested in each other from the get go, and even though our relationship involved absolutely no physical connection, we were defined by our status as almost-together. And so, because Haley thinks about the past present future endlessly, she has decided that the mess she cleaned up a long time ago still holds a lesson to be learned, a tale to be told: no matter how much passion you have, no matter how a many romantic nights you have under the stars or movie days spent tangled in limbs and sheets, you have absolutely nothing without a friendship underneath it all.

Eventually, that passion will evolve. Eventually, after that fire has burned away, you are left with love, the warm and flickering glow of love. It's like this: yes, tsunami can topple a city in a instant, but the steady splash of the waves on the rock goes on forever, shifting and eroding the earth with time. It's that subtlety, that quiet connection after the storm has passed and the seas are calm that allows a relationship to continue.

Friendship, not atop the love you share but laced within it, is the only way to find something eternal. So talk. Laugh. Tell stories about your childhood and act like a complete fool. There's a good chance that those memories will be the ones that never leave.