You don’t know this, but you were the love of my life for longer than the minute we were actually as one. So much of my journey was centered on you, even when you were nowhere close to the galaxy of stars, planets, black holes and asteroids revolving and landing around me. Your moment was that of a shooting star passing within my orbit, but you felt like a comet burning bright and strong and so close to home.

For a very long time you were the beacon of my thoughts pouring out onto the pages of my journals. Every car ride, every phone call, every night spent looking up into the stars while wrapped within your arms. Every teardrop, every aching heartbeat, and every empty breath I inhaled after you were gone. All of those moments forever embedded in my journals. I was young, I was in love, and you were the sun introducing light, then sorrow, into my soul.

I look back now as I read through those moments with and without you, and with a smile I can still feel you in that way. I can still give that minute the warmth and respect it deserves, at a time in my life when I now know the difference between a minute and a day. We may have lost time the first night we shared as one, and time may have turned our minute into a second within our lives now, but as I sit here traveling back in time through those moments of my journey . . . that minute, at that time, will always feel longer than a day.