My Lila, my babi, my love, my beautiful favorite person — if I could somehow gather all the little moments in which you have crossed my mind and place them in front of you, I think you would finally understand why writing about you is so difficult for me. It isn't because I don't know what to say. It is because there is too much to say. You have become woven into so many quiet corners of my life that sometimes I notice you in places where I never expected to. A song can remind me of you. A random thought can remind me of you. Something funny can happen and my first thought is that I wish you were here so I could tell you. Even an ordinary moment can suddenly feel warmer simply because I know that somewhere in my day, there is you.

There is something so special about being loved by someone who feels like home even from far away. That is what you have slowly become for me. Not a place, not a perfect moment, not some imaginary version of love that only exists when everything is easy, but a person I genuinely want to keep knowing. I don't want to know only the obvious things about you. I want to know the tiny details that other people might overlook — the things that make you laugh unexpectedly, the things that make you quiet, the thoughts that stay in your head longer than you tell anyone, and the little things that make you say, “wait, I need to tell you something.”

I think one of my favorite things about you is the way you let me into your everyday life without making a big deal out of it. You send me something because you saw it and thought I would like it. You send a picture because you wanted me to see what you were seeing. You send a silly video because something made you laugh and you wanted to share that laugh with me. You start yapping about one thing and somehow, before I know it, we are five completely different topics deep. And honestly, I wouldn't trade that for anything. Those moments may look small from the outside, but to me, they are little reminders that I have a place in your day.

I love your yaps in a way I don't think I could ever explain properly. I love the stories that begin with one sentence and somehow become a whole adventure. I love the random details you decide are important enough to tell me. I love hearing your opinions, your little complaints, your sudden ideas, your excitement, your questions, and even the things you probably think are completely unimportant. I don't need every conversation with you to be deep or meaningful. I like that sometimes you can simply talk, and I can simply listen, because there is something comforting about hearing the mind of the person I love move from one thought to another.

And your silly videos — I hope you know how much I treasure those too. Sometimes I probably smile at my screen more than you realize. It isn't always the video itself that makes me happy. It is the thought behind it. Somewhere, for a second, you saw something and decided that it belonged in my day too. You could have kept scrolling. You could have laughed at it alone. Instead, you sent it to me. That tiny action says more than you probably realize. It tells me that even in the middle of your own little world, there are moments when your mind reaches for mine.

I love every little “look what I found,” every random picture, every thought you suddenly remember, every message that begins with absolutely no context, and every little thing you send because you want me to know about it. I love that you share the pieces of your world with me. Since we are LDR, I cannot simply walk over and see what you are doing. I cannot casually sit beside you and notice the little things happening around you. So when you send me something, it feels like you are opening a tiny window and saying, “come look at this part of my day.” I will always want to look.

I also love the things you tell me you want to do someday. The places you want to see, the food you want to try, the random plans that appear out of nowhere, the little ideas that make you excited, and all those moments when you imagine something and let me hear about it. I love listening to your dreams because they remind me that there is so much life waiting ahead of you. And selfishly, I love imagining some of those future moments with you. Not because I need everything to happen exactly the way we imagine it, but because there is something beautiful about knowing that there are still so many things we have not experienced together.

Sometimes I imagine what it will feel like when the distance is no longer something we have to calculate. No more looking at a screen and wishing I could reach through it. No more having to turn a hug into words because I cannot physically give you one. No more wishing that a simple “come here” could actually bring you closer. I imagine sitting beside you while you talk about something you have already told me three times, and I imagine pretending to complain while secretly loving every second of it. I imagine laughing with you over something completely stupid, sharing food, taking random pictures, making ordinary errands feel like dates, and finally getting to experience the little things we currently have to imagine.

Until then, I don't want the distance to convince us that what we have is somehow less real. Distance is difficult, yes. There are moments when I hate that I cannot simply be there. There are moments when I wish I could make the miles disappear for one night just so I could hold you and let you feel how much I missed you without needing a paragraph to explain it. But loving you has taught me that closeness is not measured only by how many steps separate two people. Sometimes closeness is knowing who you want to tell first. Sometimes it is knowing someone's little habits. Sometimes it is remembering the things they love. Sometimes it is hearing their name and feeling your whole mood change.

I want to be the person who remembers the little things about you. I want to remember the stories you tell me, the things you get excited about, the things you want to try, the things that make you laugh, and the things that make you feel safe. I want to notice when your messages feel different. I want to learn when you need comfort and when you simply need someone to listen. I want to understand that sometimes you don't need me to fix anything at all; maybe you just need someone who will stay and hear you out. If I can become better at loving you by learning you more carefully, then I want to keep learning.

I don't want you to feel like you have to perform happiness for me. You don't have to make every conversation exciting. You don't have to always know what to say. You don't have to pretend that everything is okay when it isn't. If you are tired, you can be tired. If you are overwhelmed, you can say that. If you need reassurance, you can ask for it. If you simply want to yap until your thoughts finally feel organized, I want to be there for that too. I don't want only the polished version of you. I want the honest one, the sleepy one, the emotional one, the ridiculous one, the quiet one, and every version in between.

And I hope you never underestimate how cute you are when you are simply being yourself. There are probably things you do without noticing that I find ridiculously adorable. The way you react to things. The way you get excited. The way you send something and wait for my reaction. The way your personality comes through even in a tiny message. You don't always have to try to be cute for me. You already are. Some of my favorite versions of you are the ones that happen naturally, when you aren't thinking about whether you look adorable or whether you are saying the right thing.

I want you to know that my love for you is not based on everything being perfect. I don't expect us to understand each other perfectly every single time. We are two different people with different thoughts, moods, experiences, and ways of expressing ourselves. There may be days when we miss each other badly and somehow still end up misunderstanding each other. There may be conversations that take patience. There may be moments when one of us needs time to breathe before talking again. But I never want one difficult moment to make us forget all the reasons we chose each other in the first place.

When something between us feels difficult, I want my first instinct to be understanding rather than leaving. I want to ask questions instead of assuming. I want to listen instead of preparing an answer while you are still speaking. I want to learn how to communicate with you in ways that make you feel heard, not simply answered. I know I will not always get everything right, but I want you to see that I am willing to keep trying. Loving someone, to me, should not mean being perfect at it. It should mean caring enough to keep learning.

There are so many ordinary things I want with you. I want conversations that have no destination. I want random calls where neither of us planned what to talk about. I want the sleepy moments when one of us is barely keeping our eyes open. I want the jokes that become inside jokes. I want pictures that would look completely meaningless to anyone else but would make us laugh because we remember exactly what happened. I want little traditions that slowly become “our thing.” I want the kind of memories that aren't impressive to anyone else but become priceless to us simply because we were there.

I want to know the future you too. Not because I expect you to stay exactly the same, but because I hope I get to watch you become more and more yourself. People grow. Dreams change. Priorities shift. New interests appear. Life teaches us things we could never have predicted. I don't want to love only the person I know today while being afraid of who you might become tomorrow. I want to keep meeting you as you grow. I want to hear about the new things you care about. I want to celebrate the things you accomplish. I want to encourage you when something feels impossible. I want to be proud of you in all the quiet ways that matter.

If there is ever a day when you look at yourself and feel like you are not enough, I hope you remember that I don't measure your worth by how productive you were, how pretty you felt, how perfectly you handled everything, or how many things you managed to accomplish. You are not valuable only on your best days. You are still you on the days when you feel messy, tired, uncertain, or lost. I hope you are gentle with yourself on those days. And if you need someone to remind you of the good things you cannot see in yourself right then, I hope you let me try.

I want to thank you for every piece of yourself you have trusted me enough to share. Thank you for letting me hear your stories. Thank you for the random updates. Thank you for the silly videos. Thank you for the pictures. Thank you for the yaps that somehow turn into entire conversations. Thank you for the little dreams you tell me about. Thank you for every time you thought, “she might like this,” and sent it anyway. Thank you for every laugh you have given me and every ordinary moment you have made feel less ordinary.

I hope you understand that I notice those things. I notice the effort behind them. I notice the little ways you let me be part of your life. I notice when you share something that made you happy because you wanted me to be happy too. I notice how much meaning can hide inside a simple message. And even if I don't always find the perfect words in the moment, please know that I keep those things somewhere inside me. They stay. They become part of the reason your presence feels so familiar and precious to me.

You have given me so many small reasons to smile that I don't think you realize how much they add up. It isn't one enormous moment that makes me love you. It is the accumulation of everything. Your voice. Your laugh. Your humor. Your thoughts. Your random messages. Your softness. Your stubborn little moments. Your excitement. Your silliness. Your cuteness. Your dreams. Your stories. Your way of making a normal conversation feel like something I want to save. Somehow all of those pieces became one person, and somehow that person became you.

I don't want this letter to make some impossible promise that nothing will ever change or that every day will always be easy. What I can promise is much more honest than that: I want to keep showing up with love. I want to keep choosing communication. I want to keep making room for your feelings. I want to keep finding reasons to make you smile. I want to keep listening when you yap. I want to keep watching the silly videos you send. I want to keep hearing about the things you want to do. I want to keep learning the person I love instead of assuming I already know everything about her.

And when I say I want to keep choosing you, I don't mean only in the dramatic moments. I mean in the tiny decisions too. Choosing patience when it would be easier to react. Choosing honesty when silence feels simpler. Choosing reassurance when you need it. Choosing to listen when you have a lot on your mind. Choosing to celebrate you when something wonderful happens. Choosing to stay curious about your heart. Choosing to remember that behind every message is a real person with real feelings whom I love deeply.

Maybe one day we will look back at this version of us and smile at how much of our relationship lived inside screens. Maybe we will laugh about the times we wished we could teleport. Maybe we will remember how a random picture could make an entire day better, how a silly video could become an inside joke, or how one little message from you could make me forget whatever had been bothering me. I hope those memories become proof of how much love can exist even when two people are still waiting for the day they can finally be beside each other.

I want the future to have more than just big milestones. I want the small stuff. I want mornings where I know you are nearby. I want nights where saying goodnight does not require a screen. I want to hear you laugh from the same room. I want to see your reactions without a camera between us. I want to hand you something instead of sending a picture of it. I want to sit beside you while you tell me a story and watch your face change as you get to the best part. I want to experience the simple kind of closeness we currently have to imagine.

But until that day, I will not overlook what we have now. I will appreciate the messages, the calls, the pictures, the yaps, the random thoughts, the silly videos, the plans, the reassurance, the laughter, the quiet moments, and all the little pieces of you that make their way across the distance. I will treat those things as what they are: pieces of our story. Maybe they look tiny individually, but together they make something I would never want to lose.

My Lila, I hope you know that when I call you my favorite person, I mean more than simply saying that you make me happy. I mean that I genuinely enjoy knowing you. I enjoy hearing your thoughts. I enjoy watching you get excited. I enjoy discovering your little habits. I enjoy seeing the world through the things you choose to show me. I enjoy the fact that after all the things I could be doing, there is still something special about hearing from you. You are not just someone I love. You are someone I love knowing.

If I could put one thought directly into your heart and make sure it stayed there forever, it would be this: you never have to wonder whether the little things matter to me. They do. The random things matter. The silly things matter. The tiny updates matter. The things you think are “nothing” sometimes become the things I remember most. So keep sending me the random things. Keep telling me the stories. Keep sharing the things you want to do. Keep being weird and cute and talkative and completely yourself. I don't want less of you. I want all the little pieces that make you who you are.

I also want you to know that you don't have to be afraid of being loved deeply. You don't have to shrink yourself to make love easier. You don't have to hide your feelings so you won't be “too much.” You don't have to become quieter, less emotional, less silly, less excited, or less yourself just to fit into what you think someone expects. I fell in love with a real person, not a perfectly edited version of one. So I want to keep knowing the real you, because the real you is the one I care about.

There are still so many things I want to learn about you. There are conversations we haven't had yet, jokes we haven't made yet, places we haven't seen, foods we haven't tried, pictures we haven't taken, stories you haven't told me, and versions of ourselves we haven't met yet. That thought makes me happy. It means our story still has room. It means there are still pages we haven't written. And if life lets me, I would love to keep filling those pages with you — not because I know exactly what every page will say, but because I like the idea of finding out together.

So if you ever reread this when you miss me, please don't think of this letter as a collection of pretty words. Think of it as a small piece of my heart that I wanted you to have. Think of it as me sitting somewhere far away, looking at your name on my screen, smiling at the thought of you, and wishing I could shorten the distance between us. Think of every paragraph as one more quiet way of saying, “I am here, I see you, I appreciate you, and I love you.”

I don't know how many different ways I can say “I love you” before the words stop feeling big enough. So instead, I want to show you through consistency. Through the way I listen. Through the way I remember. Through the way I care about your dreams. Through the way I want to understand your heart. Through the way I keep making space for you in my life. Through the way your happiness matters to me. Through all those ordinary choices that quietly say what a grand speech never could.

And if someday you ask me what I love most about you, I might still struggle to answer. Maybe I will tell you it is your laugh. Maybe your yaps. Maybe your silly videos. Maybe the way you get excited. Maybe your cute little reactions. Maybe the way you make me feel remembered when you send me something random. But the honest answer will always be bigger than one thing. I love the way all those little pieces become you. I love the person behind every message. I love the girl who keeps finding tiny ways to let me into her world.

And I want to keep loving her. I want to keep loving you through the chapters I already know and the chapters I haven't seen yet. I want to keep choosing you without needing every day to look the same. I want to keep discovering new reasons to smile because of you. I want to keep making little memories out of ordinary moments. I want to keep hoping for the day when distance is no longer part of our story. And until then, I want you to know that every mile between us is still being crossed by something simple and stubborn and real: my love for you.

So, my Lila, keep being exactly as wonderfully, ridiculously, beautifully you as you are. Keep yapping. Keep sending me those silly videos. Keep telling me what you want to do. Keep sending me the random things you think I should see. Keep letting me into your little world. Keep laughing, dreaming, growing, learning, and becoming whoever you are meant to become. I will be here loving the person you are today while being excited to meet every version of you that tomorrow brings.

I cannot promise that I will always have perfect words. I cannot promise that I will never make a mistake. But I can promise that my love is not something I want to treat as disposable. I want to take care of what we have. I want to protect the softness between us. I want to keep choosing the kind of love that makes room for two imperfect people to grow. And whenever I get the chance to tell you how much you mean to me, I will take it.

You are one of those people I never want to become ordinary to me. Even if I know your habits, even if I have heard the same stories, even if I have seen a hundred versions of your smile, I still want to notice you. I still want to appreciate you. I still want to be excited when your name appears. I still want to care about the tiny things. Because loving you isn't supposed to mean getting used to how special you are. I want it to mean learning how to appreciate you more deeply.

My love, there is a whole world outside this little website, and there are probably millions of things I could have been doing instead of writing all of this. But I wanted you to have these words because you deserve more than a quick “I love you” message every once in a while. You deserve to know that there is thought behind those words. There is gratitude behind them. There are memories behind them. There are hopes behind them. There is a person behind them who genuinely cares about you and feels lucky to have found you.

If I could end this letter with only one thought, I wouldn't tell you that I know exactly what the future will bring. I would tell you that, whatever beautiful little moments are still waiting for us, I hope we get to discover them together. I hope we get more reasons to laugh. More things to yap about. More silly videos. More pictures. More “look at this” moments. More plans that begin with “what if we...” More memories that start as ordinary days and end up becoming the ones we never want to forget.

And when the distance finally becomes something we talk about in the past tense, I hope we look back at this chapter and realize that all those little messages were never little at all. They were how we loved each other when we couldn't be side by side. They were how we stayed close. They were how we learned each other. They were how two people separated by miles still managed to build something that felt warm, personal, silly, comforting, and completely ours.

Until then, I will keep your little pieces close. Your yaps. Your silly videos. Your random thoughts. Your pictures. Your dreams. Your cute moments. Your laughter. Your stories. Your plans. Your heart. And most of all, you.

Thank you for being the person whose little messages can make me smile. Thank you for trusting me with your thoughts. Thank you for letting me witness the small parts of your world. Thank you for being wonderfully, imperfectly, unapologetically yourself. Thank you for giving me someone I can miss this much, love this much, and look forward to this much.

My Lila, if you ever forget what you mean to me, come back here. Read this slowly. Read the parts about your yaps. Read the parts about your silly videos. Read the parts about the future things you want to do. Read the parts about the distance. And remember that none of those things are complaints about what we don't have yet. They are reminders of what I already treasure and what I still hope we get to experience.

I love you in the quiet way that remembers things. I love you in the silly way that smiles at random videos. I love you in the patient way that wants to understand. I love you in the hopeful way that imagines our future. I love you in the everyday way that notices your name. I love you in the distance. I love you through the screen. I love you through every little piece of your day that reaches me.

And if I had to choose one thing to keep from all these paragraphs, it would simply be this: I am grateful that it is you. Out of all the conversations we could have had, we had ours. Out of all the people we could have met, we found each other. Out of all the little moments that could have passed by unnoticed, somehow so many of them became ours. And I would still choose to know you.

I would still choose your yaps. I would still choose your silly videos. I would still choose your random thoughts. I would still choose your dreams. I would still choose your laugh. I would still choose your softness. I would still choose your weirdness. I would still choose your cuteness. I would still choose the distance we are learning to cross. I would still choose the girl behind every little message. I would still choose you.

So here is the simplest truth I know how to give you: I love you, my Lila. Not because you make every day perfect, but because you make my days feel more like mine when you are part of them. Not because we have no distance between us, but because even with all those miles, you still manage to feel close. Not because I have finished learning you, but because I never want to stop. And not because I know exactly where every road ahead will lead, but because if I get to keep walking forward with you, I will be happy to discover it one little moment at a time.

I love you endlessly, my Lila. ♡