My Dear Soul,

This Christmas I finally did it. Thanks to my friend Ariel who has been typing her fingers off for the past year, we now have volume 1 of our story. I never would have gotten around to doing this myself and I'm so grateful that Ariel was willing to let me hire her for a meager pittance. As many of you know, Blair and I have been friends since fourth grade. We "went out" in junior high and then decided that we probably should just be friends until we were old enough to date. Dating age rolled around and while we dated other people, remained best friends, and pretended not to be insanely smitten with one another, neither of us really admitted that we felt a little more than friendship until the end of our senior year. We casually dated our freshman year of college and then I helped my best friend pack his bags for his two year mission to Portugal. We knew that our friendship was something special, but I think we both expected to eventually move on. And in some ways we did. We grew up.

We wrote each other while Blair was in Portugal. I dated a lot of people, almost got hitched, and then decided to go on a mission myself. May 25th, the day Blair was scheduled to get home from Portugal, I left to Brazil. We never saw each other. I knew that my decision to leave probably meant that I'd lose him forever. And although the thought made me nauseated, I fully expected to come home to meet him and his beautiful wife.

Blair dated every girl under the moon while I was in Brazil. I was learning Portuguese and spreading the gospel while he was going to school and perfecting his dating skills. In December 2006, I returned home. I had almost no expectations. I loved Blair as the best friend I'd ever known, but he hadn't written very frequently and I thought he must have moved on. The night I came home, my old pal showed up at the doorstep. My heart skipped a beat when I saw my best friend that was suddenly more handsome than I'd remembered, we both cried, and then we picked up laughing and talking like we'd done three and a half years before.

I'm so happy to have a book of the letters we wrote to each other during those three and a half years. It's something we're treasuring and we hope our children love to read. Since Valentine's Day is coming up, I thought I'd share some of the good letters once a week during the month of love. Stay tuned!

Go dig up those old notes, letters, or emails from your love. Sometimes we just need to REMEMBER.