The First Page

Intro letter for the leather notebook

Chalcea,

There was a whole stretch of my life where you didn't exist to me. Not gone, not missed. Just not there. I went to work, I made dinner, I put myself back together after things that needed putting back together, and the entire time you were thirty-five minutes away living a full life I knew nothing about.

That's the part I keep turning over. Not that we met. That we almost didn't, and I never would have known what I was missing.

Then it was a Tinder match and a line in your profile about not being afraid of your shadow self, and one conversation that had no particular reason to go anywhere. It went everywhere.

Here's what you should know about what you've done, since I don't always say it out loud in the moment. Hahaha

You are the first partner in my life who has felt like home. I moved constantly growing up and never had a place that earned that word, so I learned to find it in people instead, and the list has been short. My mom. My kid. That was it. Now it's you, and it shakes me every time I notice it.

You let yourself be known immediately. You didn't make me earn a certain number of months before you'd tell me something real. You hold yourself accountable before anyone asks you to. You remembered, from one offhand comment, that bone-in food is hard for me. And you took my list — the bullet points, the bold headers, the thing people have always told me is too much — and thanked me for it.

Now the part I want on the record, because it's the part I actually believe.

I think there's magic in this. Not the cute kind. The real kind — timing that lands in your favor for no reason you can trace, a pull toward a person before you have any evidence for it.

I don't think the universe hands you things. I think it opens doors and stays quiet about it. What I know is that I did a lot of work to be able to walk through this one, and so did you, and we arrived at the same place at the same time already able to talk to each other. That's not just luck. That's two people who got ready and then got lucky.

So this notebook....

I want a record that isn't a camera roll. Years from now I want us to be able to read what this actually felt like, in our own handwriting.

How it works: I write, I hand it to you, you write whenever you want, you hand it back. No rules about length. A paragraph counts. A list counts. Bad handwriting counts. The only thing I'd ask is that we date them, and that we tell the truth in here — the hard weeks too, not just the good ones.

I'll go first.

I feel unbelievably lucky to have found you.

Happy One Month as Girlfriends 💋

Noel