Did you know that, apparently, in France, you don’t say, “I love you” to people you aren’t having physical relations with?

I’m pretty sure we’ve never engaged in “relations,” but I’ve said those words to you countless times, and I will continue to do so without your knowledge.

I love that I could recognize your laugh from across campus. I love that I never had to put up pretenses around you. I love that I knew so certainly that we would be together forever, and that being your friend just felt like the natural course my life was supposed to take.

You were the first person to think I was funny. Did you know that? You were the very first to make me want to keep trying to make people laugh.

You were the first person to get me to believe that I was capable of critical thought. You were the very first person to make me see that I mattered. Remember how hard you had to try to get me to see it?

I find myself counting the oddest things since you’ve been gone. Legs shaved: 17. Pre-sunrise wake ups: 30. Hands drawn: 24. Days passed: 62.

Even though thinking of you gives me fairly severe chest pain now, I love you in the present tense. I always will, even though I’ll never get to hear you laugh again or find a new doodle that you had clandestinely planted in my notebooks.

I would do anything in the entire world to get back the privilege of telling you how much I love you. I would buy two plane tickets for every journey for the rest of my life if it meant you could come with me. I would replay junior year U.S. History with F.K., exactly as it was, over and over again until I had memorized every innuendo we made the entire year. I would bring you a little more candy and cake, because you would never have gained weight anyway. I would contract innumerable miserable diseases just so that you would never have to.

I want to give you everything I ever found beautiful. I want to dance with you again. (Remember when we learned to twerk via YouTube? You were way better at it.) I want to finish all the projects of questionable legality that we started when we were young.

I would be happy to hug you forever, even after we were both a little too sweaty and clammy and everyone else had moved on to other things. I should have stayed right there.

I would happily read the dictionary with you if it meant we could have more smart-sounding-but-really-incredibly-strange conversations (riddled with innuendo, of course), just to confuse people in public.

I would give you a lot of puppies.

I would never apologize again (I know you hate it when I do) if I could just tell you, I wish I had seen you again.

I just want to sleep across from you and tell you secrets again, you beautiful, smart, patient, understanding, remarkable, imaginative, captivating, perfect girl, because I loved you more than I ever loved anything.

We should have painted a mural in your room. (You had a lot of wall space.) We should have vandalized some part of the highway by your house. We should have made something no one else would ever find. I might have more of you than these photos on my phone.

Thank you for teaching me that happiness, when done right, is just as contagious as herpes. Thank you for teaching me that love, like the wind, is inexhaustible and will never run out, no matter how much of it you give away.

Because of you, I promise to never let anyone spend a day without a smile. (How hard is it to smile, really, when you think about the fact that in all the years that people have existed, I got to live at the same time as Harry Styles? And you, obviously… and you.)

I love you most of all.

—By Tyler C., 21, Texas