So you see, Molly—my Molly—, this has been for you all along.

I am not a man who is good with feelings or romance. I have never looked at you and written poetry or lost the ability to think. No, Molly, what I am able to say is that you—my dream of you—has always been with me. You were the girl I waited for when I was eight, the one who comforted me when no one would believe my deductions, the friend I almost lost when my world went dark.

I thought I'd created the brown-haired girl, but really, I was just waiting. I was waiting to walk into a morgue and see a woman who is all the things I have wished for in a friend and all the things I never believed existed. I am the last man in the world who ever expected to fall in love, but in a way, I've been in love with you since I was eight years old.

People make avatars for all kinds of things—to represent themselves, to play games, to feel stronger and cleverer and more attractive than they really are, to hide.

I created the Science Girl because no one else understood me, and I didn't believe—I never thought—I couldn't fathom—that anyone real ever would.

The truth, Molly Hooper, is that you are the Real Girl. Before I met you, I thought that the real word was always ugly and inferior, nothing to the beautiful corridors of my Memory Palace—disordered and decaying.

After all, it is a law of the universe that all things tend toward decay.

But you have saved my life, and you have been my friend, and you have slapped my face and stood by my side and understood me and let me be myself to you—my best self and my worst self. Because of you, I have learned that sometimes, the real thing is better than the imagined one. You never meant to teach me; you did it by being yourself.

I cannot live without you. You are in my mind and in front of my eyes. Perhaps people would call that love; I don't know. I only know that your face is the one I want to see in my dreams and in my waking moments. I do love you, but that seems like such a shallow word for such a big thing.

Once, when I was a boy, I was taken to a garden. A tiny, brilliantly-colored butterfly alighted on a leaf next to me, and for a split second, I touched its wing with the tip of my finger. I felt reverence course through me because that butterfly was so very real, so very alive.

Don't fly away, Molly Hooper. Don't shy away from me. You make me reverent, too. Let me touch you. Let me take you in my arms and put my lips on yours. Show me what it is to be real. I have lived such a great deal of my life in my Mind Palace, as if I was one of my own avatars, a disembodied, unreal collection of thoughts and memories. But you have made me see that I am more, that I am a man with a beating heart who can be hurt and mistaken, but who can also feel happiness and love. My own mind tried to teach me these things, in the form of the Science Girl, but it was only when I met you that I really learned them.

I have waited for you for a lifetime. Come out of my Mind Palace and be my wife.

Tomorrow you will wear white. It's traditional for a bride to wear white on the day of her wedding, isn't it? And I'll wear a jacket like a good groom should. Never mind that your white comes from a lab coat and my coat is a Belstaff, not a formal. We've never cared about such things, and we never will. Marry me, Science Girl. Marry me and teach me to be realer than the realest thing I have ever known.

I watch you now, sitting there, looking through your microscope, engrossed completely in the task at hand. You are Molly, and you are my Science Girl. I now realize that, long ago, she finished becoming you, though it took me a long time to admit it.

I'm a little frightened, I admit, to hand you this letter. It tells a great many things I have never told another person, and perhaps it will come across as self-centered. But we're all self-centered by nature, Molly Hooper. That's why it's so astounding and so cataclysmic when we finally find the person who can make us see beyond ourselves.

For most of my life, the avatars in my head guided me, and the Science Girl was the one part of myself who questioned my choices and provided a mirror for me to see my faults when I was too proud and my virtues when I was too downcast. I am glad that, as a boy, I found her, because all of my life, she has contained the questions I didn't want to ask myself but couldn't afford to avoid. Your eyes ask me those questions now.

Molly, I see now that our own minds are limited, and we need others to truly show us who we are—and to love us anyway. I did not always think I needed love, but when it was offered, I realized that it was the thing I'd craved all along.

And so, in a moment, I will come over and stand beside you. You will get up, and stand on tiptoe, and kiss me full on the lips; we're alone, but you wouldn't care if we weren't. Sometimes I like to think—hope, at least—that I've been part of making you braver. I will hand you this letter, and you will read it.

I do not know what you will say, but when I picture you reading it in my mind, I picture you smiling.