We may have always joked that I was really yours because I really am. My heart belonged to you that very first day we met - when you looked down at me in the hospital bassinet and I looked back up at you with sleepy but wild newborn eyes. Our souls were fused together in that moment and will forever be one and one, together side by side, for the rest of time.
I love you with a fierceness and a fondness that is only reserved for you. A special kind of love just for the very best sister of my mama, the aunt who loves me like her own, and who I love like my own.
I was, and still am, proud to be your niece. It was one of the greatest roles of my life, and one that I wish could have continued long into both of our lives. Every conversation and moment we had together felt purposeful - full of love and honor, life and truth, two hearts and two souls intertwined in many different ways. I miss you more than you know, and you will forever be one of the great love and heartbreaks of my life, but I feel you each and every day. In the moments when I clutch your initial pendant to my chest and think of what you would say, in the dark moments when I know no one would understand the particular pain of wanting a child as badly as you, in the joy of dreams realized and looking at our family gathered around a table, sharing plates and lives and hearts - I know you're there. I know you're always there.
Days spent with you filled me with a sense of joy and wholeness that I've never felt from anyone else. It's a wondrous thing to know you're loved so completely, to never question your worth or your self in the presence of another. When you're one in the same, when you're cut from the same heart and blood and soul that inhabits the other, when you share the same loyalty for the people that raised each of you - that bond is forever and ever and ever. I still feel it and will carry it with me for all of my days.
Thank you and I love you.