It all counts

"...what's redemptive about every relationship, is accepting this one truth - that it all counts, that the good and the bad are part of the alchemy of loving someone, the base elements break and boil and bleed, but one day there's gold. Then you are able to say, despite everything: I wouldn't be the person I am today if not for you." 

AMY HOLLINGSWORTH  from "Letters from the Closet"

I keep your letters in a box high up on a shelf. I need a ladder to get to them. It's better that way because I have a habit of glancing back over my shoulder, always trying to keep the past in view.
I dared to tell you once, how not a day goes by when you don't cross my mind. I hoped you'd understand, that you'd know I didn't say it to change anything but only because I was tired of skirting around the edges of myself, of trying not to remember and pretending none of it mattered. It all counts - that's the only way I can make sense of it, how I have never been able to lose sight of you after all these years. I thought I had to define it somehow: right/wrong, love/friendship, past/present... I thought maybe if I could just separate out the base elements I could undo whatever you are to me and never once look back again.
The truth is I carry you with me always, a part of who I was and who I am, where I've come from and where I'm going. I can't help but remember us, seventeen, an ocean apart, wanting and waiting for the distance to disappear. I think that seventeen year old me will always be waiting. Many years from now, when every hair on my head has turned grey and my life can be read from the lines on my face, there'll be a knock on the door. I'll answer it and you'll be standing there and I won't be surprised.
It will feel like a promise that in the end, despite everything, we kept.