It must have been love

It was never love in the traditional, Hollywood sense. Hell, it wasn't even love in the way we discuss family, or pets. It was love in a platonic-could-maybe-go-physical-but-probably-not way, as, truth be told, so many friendships could go, but usually don't.

I can definitively say we never fucked, nor had intention to fuck. So there's that, stated plain.

Was it love? I'm not sure. All I'm certain of is that it's over now. (Thanks, Roxette). It was certainly a mutual respect, an enjoyment of each other's virtual company, an appreciation of the world building we'd done. We gathered 'round the shared campfire and swapped stories, and we held each other's attention without fail.

Our words loved one another, and we loved one another's words, even if technically we didn't love each other.

God. This is getting away from me, and I'm starting to ramble. It's raw emotion today, I think, and the typing helps process it.

I will try to summarize how I feel more succinctly:

She's dead. The words she left behind are the only words that will ever exist from her, and it's in this echoing silence that I know what a gift our strange love-adjacent thing was. The old memories of her hurt in ways new to me.

I'm getting on in years enough that friends have started to die, and I never thought I'd outlive them.