When Eoin snapped this candid photo of Adam, all I could see was me stressing, my odd profile scrunched up as I told him not to get involved in a strained voice. But instead of focusing on myself, what I should have really seen was Adam, calmly dealing with me, talking me down, making sure I was alright.
I can't believe that in just 4 and a half weeks I leave for America and have to say goodbye to my best friend. I am living in denial, I don't want to think about it but yet it is the only thing on my mind when I think of America.
Four months is a long time. I'm used to being able to run down the stairs with a grin on my face just to show him a photo I saw on twitter of a kitten and a rabbit asleep together, I'm used to lying next to him and talking into the night about politics and religion and life and us. I'm used to having him within arms reach, just a couple of words away from holding me.
As much as I am excited at the prospect of a transatlantic move to start a new life in the states, I am dreading the distance and the time spent apart.
This is what we wanted, it was what we decided from the moment we both knew we were going to spend a year abroad. We knew that to get the most out of the experience we needed to disregard our relationship and focus on what each of us wanted to do for a year. We both got our top choices, it wasn't like we were lumped with universities this far apart, and the year itself I am sure will be amazing, but that doesn't make it any easier.
I think as much as we have talked about "America" in a vague, noncommital way, neither of us have fully realised what next year means. I don't want to think of things as the last of anything, I don't want to spend my last weeks with Adam mourning and crying. But I'm finding it hard to feel okay about the distance.
If Adam was just my boyfriend, things would be different. I am not someone who needs a boyfriend. But Adam is my best friend, the person I clicked with from the first day I met him and before he was my boyfriend, he was always someone I could be myself around, someone who somehow found me funny and interesting, someone who could always make me laugh or beat me at whist. I have never before found someone that I have wanted to be around even when I don't want to come into contact with another human being ever again.
I know that he will have an awesome time in San Diego, and that I will have an equally awesome albeit very different time in Pennsylvania and that he can still make me laugh or smile through a text message or over a phone call. But not being able to hold him or be held for four months is going to be tough.
I'll miss the way he has to check his hair four thousand times before he leaves the house. I'll miss his silly little phrases and the way he can't stay still and somehow manages to move small objects from one side of the house to the other without noticing. I'll miss the beautiful smile that he somehow doesn't really like and the poses he pulls the minute you put a camera in his face. I'll miss his soft beard and the precision of his slightly curled mustache. I'll miss standing with my face pressed against his chest and feeling the weight of his chin on the top of my head. I'll miss the way he says my name whilst grinning and rolling his eyes as he talks me down from the irrational thoughts in my head.
I now have just one week left with him, in amongst trips to Spain and Amsterdam, festivals and spending time with family and it is terrifying. I will miss him so much.
Adam is the best person I've ever met. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I miss him after two weeks apart, let alone sixteen.
This is definitely the hardest part about next year; I don't want to start a new life without him. But I can and I will just as he can and he will, and time will move as it always does until we are back together in Canterbury for the final year of our degrees. Who knows where we'll be or who we'll be or what will have changed, but we will have got through it. And I'll look back to this summer and wish I was back here again, waiting for my life to change, to move to America, and that this was the hardest thing in my life, when graduation and jobs and real life pile on.
But for now I just wish I didn't have to say goodbye.
