love first appeared in your voice, gentler
than the faintest evening wind, a thread
slipping through the curtains of my window;
i thought the flutter of a heart belonged
only to lovers, to fools, to fantasy.

to sit beside you was to learn how
patience rests like delicate rays of light on skin,
how affection does not rush but settles
into the quiet hollows of the ordinary with
pause, daring each breath to linger.

so it was that i came to love you in time, falling
for a voice, a smile, the way sleep overtakes
our bodies: slowly, delicately, then all at once,
as though the universe itself cradled my heart,
pleading that my eager soul would learn surrender.

and still, the careful threads of love move outward;
they linger in the echoes of laughter around weathered
tables, in the way knowing eyes meet across
a crowded room, and settle around me like
a hand on my shoulder when words fall away.

‘i’m in love with you’, you said once, and in those
simplest words i heard more than a confession
to the stars; i heard the exuberant bravery of one
who refuses to let truth remain unspoken,
who savors its defiance in saying it plain.

i have since measured my days not in the weight
of calendars fading on the wall, but by the gifts
folded into a letter, by those in a silence shared,
a sky too vast to conquer alone yet wide enough
to explore in the welcome company of compassion.

if clocks insist on ticking, let them measure
not hours but the nearness of our fleeting breath,
the hush suspended in the space of our
mingled air, where love gathers softly like a quilt
in the slow unravelling of our fingers, intertwined.

i’ve come to see love not as a flame standing alone
but as a hearth, the table where strangers gather,
each chair left warm from the weight of someone’s
passing, the mantle lined with photos once too dear
to risk, their dust brushed gently with patient hands.

each one reminds me to love, to cherish, even under
the strain of the world undone; to love with courage,
slowly, then all at once, with the ease of breathing
truths once withheld, the flame lapping close as if
to pull me back, remind me what waits undone.