Choices
A Quiet Love Poem
Before I knew your name
there was already a space beside me
shaped like your breath.
I had walked through years
full of voices and hands and passing light,
but none of it settled in my bones.
Then one evening,
without ceremony, without warning,
the world leaned slightly toward you,
and something in my chest
recognized the gravity.
Did lightning strike the sky?
Did music rise out of nowhere
like in the films?
No, it was smaller than that.
A pause that lasted half a heartbeat too long.
A sentence spoken slowly
as though neither of us wished
to reach its end.
Love rarely announces itself with spectacle.
More often it arrives quietly,
like a chair being pulled closer
to the fire.
I began to notice things.
The way your laughter
seemed to fall from you
instead of being forced.
The way your eyes
held their questions
as though curiosity were a kind of prayer.
Even the silence between us felt deliberate.
Just two people
standing at the edge
of something neither had named yet.
There is a moment in every love story
when the world pauses and waits.
For the simple decision
to step closer
instead of stepping away.
We chose closeness.
Again and again
in a thousand quiet moments
no one else ever saw.
I have discovered that love
is more than the fire.
The fire is easy.
Desire can rise
like dry grass in summer,
bright and hungry and loud.
But then, the fire burns fast.
What matters more
is what remains
when the flames grow low.
What remains is the reaching.
Your hand finding mine
against the glass.
Your voice softened by the weight
of saying my name.
The slow, patient work
of learning another soul
without trying to reshape it.
There have been days
when the world pressed against us.
The small fractures of living.
The doubts.
The fatigue.
Love is not blind to these things.
It sees them clearly.
And still, here in our arms,
it endures.
I learned then
that devotion is so much more
than being the loudest
in the room.
Devotion is actually quieter.
It is the act of waking
each morning
and choosing faith in motion.
Because the thought
of another path
feels strangely empty.
Time passes.
It always does.
The years will gather around us
like the rings in the trunk of a tree,
marking the storms
and the summers
and the silent winters.
Yet something remains unchanged.
The gravity.
The pull
that first bent the world
slightly toward you.
And now
when the night settles in
and the world grows still,
I will close my eyes
and see you there
as you always are...
familiar,
imperfect,
extraordinary.
And I understand something
I did not know then.
Love is when two things happen.
The first
is when you meet,
and the second
is when you find each other
every
single
day
after.
Beautiful
Who's cutting the onions....