marykatewiles:

For the past half hour or so I’ve been cleaning out pictures and voicemails and texts on my phone, and I came across a thing Rachel wrote me a couple months ago that I wanted to share with you all.

Being Lydia was really hard at times, and I think I hinted at that to you all, but I really owe Rachel quite a bit for being there for me, completely and wholly, throughout the whole process. Anytime I needed to text her simply saying “I’m sad” or “I’m mad at George” or whatever, she didn’t judge. She didn’t say, “MK, Lydia isn’t real, get a grip and live your own life”, she didn’t reprimand for taking more stock in Lydia’s problems in order to forget about my own. She just was constantly, quietly there, always listening and understanding, and I think that’s because she felt some of it too. And I needed that, and I’m really thankful for that.

But anyway, I expressed to her how hard it was becoming to let Lydia go, and she wrote me this:

“Lydia will never be lost. She’s become so real, so unbelievably real, and she is going to keep on living her life with or without us. And maybe every once in a while we’ll check in with her, see how things are, who she’s become, and it won’t ever be the same, but that’s how life tends to work. She doesn’t die with the show, she doesn’t die with us going off and telling new stories. She keeps on. And she’s got a lot to deal with and a long way to go in her life, and I wish we could be there to help her through it, but she’s gonna be okay. She’s learning how to communicate, she’s learning how to love, and she’s learning how to let herself be loved. You gave her that, we gave her that, she gave herself that. It’s all the same, but we gave her all we could, and now she’s gotta strike out on her own. And you know what? I don’t want to let her go either, but I think we gave her enough. She’s gonna be okay.

She’s someone you should be proud of, and I know she’s proud of you, too. So am I.”

And you know what? Mary Kate and the rest of us will always have fanfiction. We’ll always have people who follow Lydia’s story after the LBD and keep telling us about her adventures and all the things that she’s accomplished and all the ways she’s grown. We don’t have to let her go.  Not Mary Kate, not Rachel, not me, not you.