You can't actually have a romance between friends. That sort of defeats the definition of the word "romance." The word you're looking for is "love." It's a love between friends, just as there's also love between lovers, or possible lovers, or even ex-lovers. Same holds true for "bromance" - it's just a clever word used to avoid the word love, for straight boys who don't want that old-fashioned taint of gayness. Dudes, you love each other. Deal with it.

The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest. Each of us had a first sentence, and most of us found the strength to say it out loud to someone who deserved to hear it. What we hoped, and what we found, was that the second sentence of the truth is always easier than the first, and the third sentence is even easier than that. Suddenly you are speaking the truth in paragraphs, in pages. The fear, the nervousness, is still there, but it is joined by a new confidence. All along, you've used the first sentence as a lock. But now you find that it's the key.

So what else can I tell you?" I asked. "I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me.

New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.

incessant adj. The doubts. You had to save me from my constant doubts. That deep-seeded feeling that I wasn't good enough for anything I was a fake at my job I wasn't your equal my friends would forget me if I moved away for a month. It wasn't as easy as hearing voices nobody was telling me this. It was just something I knew. Everyone else was playing along but I was sure that one day they would all stop.

But there was something about you that made me think of sparks and motion.

It daunted me that you were so beautiful, that you were so at ease in social situations, as if every room was heliotropic, with you at the center. And I guess it daunted you that I had so many more friends than you, that I could put my words together like this, on paper, and could sometimes conjure a certain sense out of things. The key is to never recognize these imbalances. To not let the dauntingness daunt us.