I’m going to be perfectly honest with you—I’m not that good with feelings. Sure, I can write a six-foot essay on transfiguration, charm a quill to do somersaults, or fight off Grindylow almost without thinking, but sorting through feelings is not one of my strengths. I guess it’s because I don’t practice very often. I usually just ask Remus; he’s pretty good with that sort of thing.

But I can’t ask Remus to write this letter for me, so you’re just going to have to bear with me while I set the record straight before the school year ends and I forget how to describe my feelings about things between us. I hope that phrase doesn’t scare you off, “between us�. Please keep reading; you’re almost at the most important part.

Here’s the thing, Lily. I know I used to ask you out a lot, and say I loved you every other week (except for the time I serenaded you at breakfast—but I guess you don’t really want to remember that). All that time, I thought I was madly in love with you. But the truth is, I never loved you at all.

I think you probably already knew that; I imagine that’s why you always said no, yelled at me, or (worst of all) ignored me. Before you decide to do that again, though, the thing you need to understand is that I would never deliberately lie to you. I thought I did love you.

Most people—Remus included—agreed with me. I couldn’t stop thinking about you: your beautiful, silky hair; your sense of humor; your piercing green eyes. I thought you were perfect.

That is not to say that I don’t still think all of those things. You are perfect; your hair is like a cascade of beauty down your back, you’re clever and insightful, and reflected in your green eyes I see kindness and compassion.

But I was wrong to stop there.

The problem with my thinking I loved you is that love is the ultimate way to care about someone. Any qualifiers we add somehow make it less true than the pure, unadulterated phrase. “I love you a lot,� while sweet in sentiment, is faintly saccharine; it carries that cardboardish, packaged sort of smell I associate with the greeting card isle of drugstores. “I love you,� just that phrase, sans addendums, frills, adverbs, or other interfering letters, carries so much weight. Each word in that sentence is powerful enough to turn back the tide, to move a mountain, to win a heart. Who was I, an arrogant fifteen-year-old, to sing about my love for you in front of the whole school? Who was I to say “I love you�, the most powerful words in the English language, more so than even avada kedavra, when my loving you was something I decided on a whim and kept believing long afterwards because my definition of love was so simplistic?

Remus would say I’m being hard on myself here; after all those rejections I would sometimes wish I had fallen for another girl, and after all, if it wasn’t love then surely I would have. He would say I was crazy enough about you that even if it weren’t love, it was pretty darn close and not worth making the distinction from anyway.

You and I know better. I had no right, poor as I am at figuring out feelings, to claim for myself the emotion more powerful than any other when I couldn’t even tell when I was jealous.

Lily, we’ve gotten to be pretty good friends this year—at least, I’d like to think so. I say “pretty good� because I’m not sure how you think of me; I know you’re one of my best friends in the world (okay, so Sirius, Remus, and Peter are the other three). If you don’t think of us as being that close, that’s okay. I’ve already written too much here to start worrying about what you think of me. You need to know that I know these things, because I care about you. But that’s beside the point.

On second thought, that’s exactly the point.

I value our friendship so much, Lily. And as much as I want to say I would never do anything to endanger it, what I’m about to write might do exactly that.

Lily, I’ve discovered two things this year. The first discovery, the one I’ve tried to explain here, is that I didn’t love you.

The second is that now I do.

Last year, Lily, I thought loving you meant daydreaming about you, singing to you, flirting with you, trying to be with you constantly.

My friends are glad I’ve discovered that love is something else entirely. A friend who thinks he is lovesick is no help to anyone, least of all to Marauders trying to orchestrate a Halloween prank.

So this year I tried to eliminate the “I love you so much� and just be friends with you. And what was I left with? “I love you�. Just “I love you�.

Lily, you have the whole summer to think about this letter. And if you write me back saying you never want to talk to me again, I’ll have the whole summer to get over you.

Or not get over you, which is more accurate, I think. I probably couldn’t get over loving you in ten summers. But that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t want to get over you, and that’s why I’m writing this.

So I’ve put our friendship on the line here, and you might hate me for that. And if all you want is for things to go back to the way they were, that’s okay. I could probably make out pretty well pretending not to love you, and we could try to be friends again.

But I always will love you.

This is a different kind of love, Lily. It’s not love that screams at you, forces its voice into situations, or sings at breakfast. It’s just always there.

It’s always there, Lily, affecting everything I do, quietly reminding me how much I care about you.

It’s the kind of love infused with certainty, certainty that it can only grow better and stronger. The only uncertainty in this whole situation is how you feel about all of this, which I probably should be able to figure out. I’m just really not that good with feelings. That’s Remus’ department.