I think October is very similar to February. Not in temperature, not really, one still holds onto the last warm afternoons while the other gives up entirely and lets the cold have its way. But in missing you, they are the same. In October I miss you the way you miss summer, a little in…
I think October is very similar to February. Not in temperature, not really, one still holds onto the last warm afternoons while the other gives up entirely and lets the cold have its way. But in missing you, they are the same. In October I miss you the way you miss summer, a little in denial, pretending the season hasn’t really turned. In February I miss you the way you miss anything that’s been gone too long, plainly, without pretending at all.
I think about winter a lot when I think about you. How it asks you to slow down. How it makes you want someone to share a blanket with, not because you’re cold exactly, but because the cold makes you aware of all the places you’re empty. You used to fill those places without even trying. Now the cold comes and I notice every one of them.
I miss the small things most. I miss wanting to eat an orange with you, pulling it apart slow on a Sunday, handing you the pieces I already know you’ll steal anyway. I miss the way you always dug the biscoff out of the cake first, saving it for last, which never made sense to me, saving the best part only to eat it alone at the end. I used to tease you about that. Now I’d give anything to watch you do it one more time.
Love, I think, isn’t loud in October or February. It’s quiet in both. It’s a hand you keep reaching for out of habit before remembering. It’s a coat that still smells like someone even after they’ve stopped wearing it around you. Winter doesn’t rush grief, and neither does missing you. It just sits there, patient, snowing a little more each day you don’t come home.
People think February is the coldest because of the number on the thermometer. I think it’s the coldest because it’s furthest from summer, furthest from the version of us that existed in warm light and open windows. October is the beginning of that distance. February is the middle of it. And I am stuck somewhere between the two, missing you the way you miss a season you can still half remember the smell of.
If you came back in October, I’d want to eat an orange with you on the porch and pretend the cold wasn’t coming. If you came back in February, I’d want to make you a cake just so I could watch you dig out all the biscoff first, laughing at you the way I used to, loving you the way I never stopped.
I think October is very similar to February. I miss you dearly in both. I think I will keep missing you in every season that isn’t the one you were still here for.
I have been a thousand people. A warrior with calloused hands and a heart turned to stone. A scholar bent over books until my eyes burned. A wanderer who knew every road but no home. I have tasted victory and defeat, held newborns and closed the eyes of the dying, built cathedrals, and watched them…
I have been a thousand people. A warrior with calloused hands and a heart turned to stone. A scholar bent over books until my eyes burned. A wanderer who knew every road but no home. I have tasted victory and defeat, held newborns and closed the eyes of the dying, built cathedrals, and watched them crumble to dust.
I have known many things. Power. Loss. The quiet satisfaction of work well done. The hollow ache of waking up alone in a bed too big for one person. I have been rich and poor, celebrated and forgotten, loved and left, and sometimes all three in the same lifetime.
But I never knew this.
I never knew the way sunlight catches in your hair when you laugh. I never knew how a single text from you could turn an ordinary Tuesday into something worth remembering. I never knew that love could feel like coming home to a place I had never been, like finding a room in my heart I did not know existed until you walked in and turned on the light.
I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you.
It started small. A conversation that lasted longer than it should have. A shared joke that made us both snort with laughter. The way you remembered the little things, the coffee order, the name of my childhood dog, and the story I told you once about learning to ride a bicycle and falling into a hedge. You listened. You really listened. And somewhere between the small talk and the deep talk, between the silence and the song, I fell.
Not the dramatic, sweeping-off-your-feet kind of falling. The slow, steady kind. The kind that happens when you realize you are happier with someone than without them. The kind that sneaks up on you when you are not looking, like spring arriving after a long winter, like flowers pushing through snow.
I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you.
Now my days are brighter. The world is softer at the edges. Ordinary moments feel like gifts: cooking dinner together and burning the garlic bread, dancing in the kitchen to songs only we know the words to, falling asleep on the couch with your head on my chest and your breathing slow and steady against my skin.
I love the way you hum when you are concentrating. I love how you get excited about things other people find boring. I love that you see the best in people even when they do not deserve it, that you believe in second chances and happy endings and the possibility of something better waiting just around the corner.
You make me want to be better too. Not because I am not enough, but because with you, I want to be more. I want to build something beautiful. I want to fill this life with laughter and adventure and all the small, sweet moments that add up to a lifetime of love.
I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you.
Sometimes I think about the other versions of me. The ones who never found this. The ones who settled for less, who convinced themselves that companionship was enough, that passion fades, that love is a story we tell ourselves to make the loneliness easier to bear. I wonder if they feel the absence, even if they do not know what they are missing. I wonder if they look up at the stars and feel something stirring in their chest, a longing they cannot name.
I hope they find their way here. I hope they find their way to you.
Because this, what we have, is rare. It is bright and lovely and real. It is the kind of love that poets write about and singers sing about and people spend their whole lives searching for. And I found it. In this life. In this moment. With you.
I have lived a thousand lives, but I fell in love in this one, where I met you. And I would choose you in every single one of them.
the politics of deservingness and the moral regulation of poetry There is an unspoken entry fee at the door of contemporary poetry, and it is paid in suffering. Open a literary magazine, scroll a poetry Instagram account, sit through a university workshop, and you will notice the pattern quickly: the poems that get anthologized, awarded,…
the politics of deservingness and the moral regulation of poetry
There is an unspoken entry fee at the door of contemporary poetry, and it is paid in suffering. Open a literary magazine, scroll a poetry Instagram account, sit through a university workshop, and you will notice the pattern quickly: the poems that get anthologized, awarded, and shared are disproportionately poems of wounding. Poems about a father’s violence. Poems about a body’s illness. Poems about war, displacement, grief, addiction, abuse. Joy, when it appears, tends to arrive heavily qualified, undercut by irony, or framed as something stolen briefly from an otherwise grim ledger.
I want to ask a blunt question: why does a poem so often need to prove it has suffered before we grant it our attention?
The credentialing of pain
Think about how we talk about “important” poems. We use words like raw, unflinching, urgent, necessary. These words do double duty. They describe craft, yes, but they also function as credentials, evidence that the poet has earned the right to speak by having survived something. A poem about heartbreak that stays in the register of longing is “slight.” A poem about heartbreak that includes a psychiatric ward is “essential.”
Consider how differently we receive these two stances toward loss. First, restraint:
I do not love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire
That is Neruda, and it survives in translation as tenderness without wreckage. Compare the register we now expect from “serious” grief poetry, closer to Sharon Olds:
I see him standing at the formica counter, with a bag of Wonder Bread, making his lunch, pulling the bread out of the wrapper
Olds is a great poet, and this quiet domestic image is doing real work, building toward devastation. But notice what our culture has trained us to expect: the domestic detail must eventually detonate. A poem that lingers in the Wonder Bread without ever cutting to the wound would, in most workshops, be told it “doesn’t earn its ending.”
Deservingness as a moral category, not an aesthetic one
This is where I think the real issue lives. We have imported into poetry a logic that properly belongs to welfare policy and courtroom sentencing: the logic of deservingness. In social policy, deservingness theory explains why some people in need receive sympathy and resources while others do not. Scholars like Joe Soss and others have shown that a “deserving” recipient of aid is coded as blameless, suffering through no fault of their own, and ideally visibly suffering, so that their need is legible at a glance.
Poetry has absorbed the same architecture. A poem “deserves” its space in the anthology if the suffering behind it is visible, legible, and attributable to something the poet did not choose: a diagnosis, a genocide, a parent’s failure. A poem about mild boredom, mild contentment, or a Tuesday that was simply fine, has no claim on our moral attention because it has not demonstrated need.
You can see the demand for legible wounding even in poems that resist it, like Lucille Clifton’s:
won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model.
Even here, celebration is only granted permission because it is framed against a background of having had no model, of having come through. Joy is legitimated retroactively, as survival’s dividend, not as a thing that might simply exist on its own terms.
The whiteness, and not-whiteness, of who gets to be light
There is also a racialized and gendered dimension to this that deserves naming directly. Poets from marginalized communities are frequently expected, by editors, by prize committees, by the market itself, to write the wound. A Black poet writing about police violence will find doors open in a way that a Black poet writing a quiet pastoral about tending tomatoes will not. This is its own form of moral regulation: it tells poets from certain backgrounds that their literary value is contingent on performing legible, extractable trauma for an audience that consumes it as testimony.
Ross Gay has written directly against this expectation, insisting on delight as a discipline:
and though this book is called catalog of unabashed gratitude it is really a mash note to delight
Gay’s whole project in The Book of Delights is a quiet insurgency against the idea that seriousness requires suffering. He has spoken about how often people ask him, gently but persistently, when he’ll write the “harder” book, as though delight were the warm-up act before the real poem.
What we lose
When we make suffering a precondition for poetic legitimacy, we lose several things at once.
We lose the poems that could honor ordinary contentment, the ones that might have said something true about a life that was, on balance, fine, which is to say most lives, most of the time. We lose the poets who do not want to convert their private pain into public currency, and who therefore stop writing, or write in silence, because the market has told them plainness is not enough.
We also, perversely, cheapen suffering itself. When trauma becomes a genre convention, a checkbox that signals literary seriousness, it stops functioning as testimony and starts functioning as aesthetic wallpaper. Consider Wisława Szymborska’s cooler, more skeptical eye on this exact temptation:
Whatever I say can be contradicted at any moment by evidence I haven’t seen.
Szymborska’s poetry is often about resisting the neat moral packaging of experience, including the packaging of suffering into something legible and prize worthy. Her irony is a rebuke to the idea that a poem must announce its wound to be taken seriously.
Toward a different economy of attention
I am not arguing that poems about pain are illegitimate or that we should stop reading them. Some of the poems I love most in the world are unflinching accounts of harm, and that unflinching quality is precisely their gift. What I am questioning is the structural requirement, the sense that a poem must present a receipt of suffering before it is allowed to matter, before an editor will publish it, before a reader will sit still for it.
What would it look like to read a poem about an ordinary afternoon with the same attention we give a poem about a hospital room? What would it mean to let a poem about simple, uncomplicated love stand next to a poem about abandonment, and to resist the reflex that tells us only one of them is doing real work?
Maybe it would look like reading Mary Oliver’s small, stubborn insistence:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
A question that asks nothing of us except attention, offers no wound as collateral, and still, somehow, has never stopped mattering.
the white rose at the florist’s shop reminded me of Her, not the rose’s whiteness exactly, but the way it held itself upright in the water, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world to open. That was Her too. The patience in her hands when she braided her hair, the quiet…
the white rose at the florist’s shop reminded me of Her,
not the rose’s whiteness exactly, but the way it held itself upright in the water, unhurried, as if it had all the time in the world to open. That was Her too. The patience in her hands when she braided her hair, the quiet certainty in how she said my name, like she’d practiced it long before we ever met.
I stood at the glass separating me from the flowers and thought: this is what it means to be reminded of someone by something small. Not a photograph, not a song on the radio, but a rose, ordinary, sold by the dozen, that somehow carried her whole weather inside it.
I bought one. I don’t know why, except that loving her has taught me to collect evidence of tenderness wherever I find it, to press proof of her into my pockets like a boy saving ticket stubs. Maybe I believed that if I carried the white rose home, I would be carrying a small, portable version of her, enough softness to get me through until I saw her again.
On the walk back, the petals kept their color against the grey evening, stubborn and bright, the way she is stubborn and bright, the way she has always insisted on blooming even in seasons that gave her every reason not to.
I am in love in the unglamorous, everyday way. In the way a flower shop window can undo me, in the way an ordinary Tuesday becomes unbearably tender the moment I remember there is a person in this world who makes white roses look like her handwriting.
Tonight I’ll give her the rose. I’ll tell her the small, embarrassing truth, that beauty, wherever I meet it now, has her name folded somewhere inside it.
I will always share the same moon as hers. However far she has gone — down the road, across an ocean, into a life I don’t get to see anymore, into a quiet I never wanted — none of it reaches the sky. The moon doesn’t measure miles. It doesn’t count the years between two…
I will always share the same moon as hers.
However far she has gone — down the road, across an ocean, into a life I don’t get to see anymore, into a quiet I never wanted — none of it reaches the sky. The moon doesn’t measure miles. It doesn’t count the years between two people, or take sides, or forget a face. It only knows how to rise, and how to be seen, and how to pour the same soft light over everyone it loves, all at once.
So tonight it finds her first. It lays its light across her shoulders the way I would, if I could reach that far. It sits at the foot of her bed like something loyal, and watches over her sleep. And then — in the very same breath — it turns, crosses all that dark, and comes to find me at my window too.
The same light. The same moon. Touching us both.
We are not as far apart as the map insists. We are two people under one lamp left burning in the hallway of the sky. When she looks up, she is looking at the exact thing I am looking at — and our eyes meet there, in that white and quiet place, even when nothing else can bring them together.
And when I miss her — and I do, and I will, I always will — I don’t have to reach for the phone, or the past, or the words I never said. I only have to step outside.
Because the oldest promise in the world is hanging right up there, where neither of us can ever lose it.
Whatever else changes. Whoever else leaves. However long the road becomes
I will always share the same moon as hers.
And in the only way that has ever really mattered, we are never truly apart.
There is a kind of grief with no funeral. No one brings food to the house for the life you didn’t get to ruin together. She was my could-have-been, and I was hers, and that is the cruelty most people miss: it takes two to leave a thing unlived. One person wanting is only longing.…
There is a kind of grief with no funeral. No one brings food to the house for the life you didn’t get to ruin together.
She was my could-have-been, and I was hers, and that is the cruelty most people miss: it takes two to leave a thing unlived. One person wanting is only longing. Two people wanting, in the same direction, across whatever the world wedged between them — that is a haunting with a witness on the other end.
We were never wrong. That was the problem. Nothing broke, so there is nothing to point at. No fight to replay, no lie to forgive. Just timing, which is the coward’s word for the thing we were both too afraid to say out loud while there was still a door, and both of us standing near it.
I know exactly where the sentence stopped. Mid-air. The way you leave a name in a drafts folder for years, because sending it would make it real and deleting it would make it over, and you cannot afford either.
Here is what nobody warns you about: the could-have-been does not fade the way the real ones do. The real ones decay. You learn their temper, their silences, the way they load a dishwasher wrong, and love thins out into something survivable. But ours never got the chance to disappoint us. It stays lit. Preserved. Perfect precisely because we never let it become anything a person could actually leave.
So it doesn’t hurt like a wound. It hurts like a phantom limb — a thing that was never fully there, still reaching.
Some nights I don’t miss her. I miss the version of me that existed only when she was looking. He was braver than I turned out to be.
And somewhere, I suspect, she does the same math. Carries the same unsent name. Stands in her own doorway. Which means we are, in a way, still keeping our appointment — the two of us, on opposite sides of a life we didn’t choose, faithfully haunting the same empty room.
It will always be about that could-have-been. Not because it was the best thing. Because it was the unfinished thing.
And the unfinished thing is the only kind that gets to stay young.
One of the first things we are taught when studying literature is to ask, “What did the author mean?” It seems like the most natural question in the world. If someone wrote a book, surely they know exactly what it is about. But what if that assumption is wrong? In 1967, the French literary critic…
One of the first things we are taught when studying literature is to ask, “What did the author mean?” It seems like the most natural question in the world. If someone wrote a book, surely they know exactly what it is about. But what if that assumption is wrong?
In 1967, the French literary critic Roland Barthes published an essay titled The Death of the Author. It remains one of the most influential works in literary theory because it challenged one simple idea: the author’s intention should not be the final authority in interpreting a text.
Barthes argued that the moment a work is published, it no longer belongs solely to the person who wrote it. Instead, it begins a new life with its readers. Every reader approaches a text with different experiences, beliefs, emotions, and cultural backgrounds. As a result, every reading of the same work is slightly different.
Think about Shakespeare’s Hamlet. For some readers, it is a revenge tragedy. For others, it is a study of grief. Some see it as a political play about corruption. Others read it as a philosophical work about mortality or a psychological exploration of indecision. None of these interpretations cancel each other out. They all exist because the text allows them to exist.
Now imagine something almost impossible. Imagine William Shakespeare returning today and telling us that Hamlet was never meant to be about indecision or existential anxiety. Imagine he insisted that modern readers had misunderstood his play for four centuries.
Would that settle the debate?
Barthes would say no.
His argument is not that authors are unimportant. It is that once a work enters the world, its meaning is no longer controlled by its creator. The text becomes independent. It belongs to every person who reads it.
This idea completely changes the way we think about literature. Instead of treating books as puzzles with one correct answer, we begin to see them as conversations. A novel written hundreds of years ago can still speak to someone today because each generation brings new questions to the same words.
This also explains why classics survive. The words on the page remain the same, but readers do not. A teenager, a parent, and a retired professor can all read the same novel and leave with entirely different interpretations. The book has not changed. The reader has.
Of course, not everyone agrees with Barthes. Many critics believe that understanding an author’s life, historical context, and intentions helps us better understand their work. Knowing about Charles Dickens’ England or Virginia Woolf’s experiences can certainly deepen our appreciation of their writing.
But Barthes invites us to ask a different question. What if literature becomes richer when we stop searching for the author’s answer and start paying closer attention to the text itself? What if meaning is not something hidden inside a book, waiting to be uncovered, but something that comes into existence every time someone reads it?
That is why The Death of the Author continues to shape literature classrooms around the world. It forces us to reconsider one of our oldest assumptions about reading. Perhaps the meaning of a book is not owned by the person who wrote it. Perhaps it belongs to the millions of people who continue to read it.
So let me leave you with one final question.
If Shakespeare himself appeared today and completely disagreed with your interpretation of Hamlet, would you change your mind?
Or has Hamlet belonged to its readers for so long that not even Shakespeare gets the final word?
That none of it was fiction. Not the trembling hands. Not the sleepless nights. Not the paragraphs that looked too tender to be true. You arrived so casually into my life that even now it feels absurd that a human being could alter the climate of another person so completely. Before you, i wrote to…
That none of it was fiction. Not the trembling hands. Not the sleepless nights. Not the paragraphs that looked too tender to be true. You arrived so casually into my life that even now it feels absurd that a human being could alter the climate of another person so completely. Before you, i wrote to survive silence. After you, i wrote because silence became impossible.
People will underline my lines someday and call them delicate. They will ask me where i learned to love like that. I will laugh quietly because there was no learning involved. There was only you sitting across from me in coffee shops while the world kept happening outside the windows. There was only your voice during random walks home. The way ordinary streets began feeling cinematic because you were walking beside me. The way goodbye started terrifying me long before it ever arrived.
And maybe that is what nobody understands about writers. We are not inventors. We are archivists. We collect moments before they disappear. The curve of a smile during a difficult week. Half-finished conversations at train stations. The warmth of someone’s shoulder during cold evenings. We store these things inside language because reality itself feels too fragile to trust.
You became every metaphor without trying. Every song i paused midway because it sounded too much like us. Every page i had to close because it suddenly carried your face between the lines. Loving you did not make me wiser. It made me observant. Suddenly i noticed how light falls on people you care about. How laughter changes when it is genuine. How certain names begin to feel heavier in the mouth because of how carefully you pronounce them.
One day these poems will belong to strangers. They will read them in cities i have never visited. Maybe they will send excerpts to people they love. Maybe someone will cry over words that were born from nights i spent missing you. And the strangest part is that they will never know you. The person responsible for all of it. The invisible fingerprint on every sentence.
They will think i possessed imagination when in truth i only possessed memory.
You were the beautiful thing. I was merely paying attention.
There are people who think love is a grand event. A confession in the rain. A wedding aisle. A hand held at the airport before departure. But most days, love looks smaller than that. Quieter. It looks like someone remembering how you take your tea after hearing it only once. It looks like forwarding a…
There are people who think love is a grand event. A confession in the rain. A wedding aisle. A hand held at the airport before departure. But most days, love looks smaller than that. Quieter. It looks like someone remembering how you take your tea after hearing it only once. It looks like forwarding a song because the lyrics reminded them of a sentence you said three months ago. It looks like your mother cutting fruit and leaving it near your laptop without saying a word because she knows you forget to eat when you are anxious.
And maybe that is why the world feels so unbearable sometimes. Not because life is inherently cruel, but because we keep brushing against the absence of love in ordinary places.
A cold reply.
An unanswered call.
An empty chair at dinner.
The silence after telling someone something that mattered to you.
Everything in life is about love. And when it is not, it is about the hunger for it.
Even ambition is just love wearing a suit and pretending to be practical. People work fourteen hour days not only for money, but because somewhere deep inside them is a child wanting to be seen. To be told, I am proud of you. We call it success because it sounds less vulnerable than saying please love me enough to notice my effort.
Loneliness is not sitting alone in a room. Loneliness is making a joke and realizing nobody knows your humour well enough to understand you were serious underneath it.
You can see it everywhere if you pay attention.
The old man at the grocery store who starts conversations with strangers because his wife died years ago and silence has become too loud in the house.
The friend who keeps posting online because they are terrified of disappearing quietly from everyone’s mind.
The person who says they do not care about relationships anymore but still checks their phone at 2:13 in the morning hoping one particular name appears.
Even anger is often wounded love. Nobody becomes bitter without first caring too much.
A child slamming a door because their father missed another school play.
A woman saying she hates romance because she once waited for someone who never arrived.
A man becoming emotionally unavailable because the last time he opened up, somebody used his softness against him.
People do not become hard naturally. Life dries them out slowly. Like wet clothes forgotten on a terrace for too many summers.
And still, despite everything, human beings continue reaching for one another in the smallest ways.
We send reels.
We wait for replies.
We save seats beside us.
We type “reached home?” after midnight.
We cook extra food hoping someone stays a little longer.
We replay voice notes after heartbreak because hearing someone laugh once loved feels better than silence.
Even grief is proof of love having existed. Nobody mourns what meant nothing.
Maybe that is why certain cities feel lonely. Certain homes feel cold. Certain songs feel like they are touching bruises inside you. Because love is not decoration in human life. It is infrastructure. It is electricity behind the walls. You only notice it fully when it is gone.
A person can survive without love the same way a plant can survive in a dark room for a while. Technically alive. Quietly dying.
And maybe the strangest thing is this:
people spend their whole lives looking for love while constantly creating it for others without realizing.
The cashier remembering your usual order.
Your friend sending you a blurry moon picture because they knew you would like it.
Someone moving to the safer side of the pavement while walking with you at night.
Your father pretending he does not understand technology just to keep asking you for help because it gives him reasons to talk to you.
Love has never only been romance.
It is attention.
It is remembrance.
It is making space.
And the absence of it explains almost every sadness we carry.
Maybe that is all life really is in the end.
A long search for places where we can soften without fear.
I will write a book about you.And when I do, I’ll describe your lips as roses. Not because they are red. Not because they are soft. But because every time they part to speak, something inside me blooms and bleeds at the same time. I do not think people understand what it means to meet…
I will write a book about you. And when I do, I’ll describe your lips as roses.
Not because they are red. Not because they are soft. But because every time they part to speak, something inside me blooms and bleeds at the same time.
I do not think people understand what it means to meet someone and immediately feel your loneliness shift shape.
Before you, love felt performative to me. Like something people exaggerated in songs because reality could never possibly hold that much feeling. Then you arrived with your tired eyes and your terrifying kindness and suddenly every love poem started sounding less embarrassing.
You do not walk into a room like thunder. You arrive quietly. But somehow, after you leave, everything feels louder. The silence grows teeth. Even my happiest moments pause for a second and look around for you.
I have memorized impossible things about you.
The way your voice changes when you are exhausted. The way you pretend to be okay by speaking softer. The way your eyes avoid mine whenever you are overwhelmed because you are afraid of being seen too deeply. But I see you anyway. God, I see you in ways that ruin me.
There are nights I lie awake thinking about the fact that your heart is currently beating somewhere in this world while mine is trying desperately to survive the distance between us.
And maybe that is love.
Maybe love is not grand gestures or perfect timing. Maybe it is just this unbearable tenderness. This constant ache. This feeling of carrying someone in your chest everywhere you go like a wound you protect instead of heal.
I want to know every version of you.
The one who laughs too hard. The one who cries in silence. The one who overthinks texts after sending them. The one who needs reassurance but hates asking for it. The one who feels unlovable on certain evenings for reasons even she cannot explain.
I want to sit beside all your storms without asking them to end.
Because you are not beautiful despite your sadness. You are beautiful because you continue to love gently in a world that has not always been gentle with you.
And I swear, there are moments when I look at you and forget every language I know. Because how is a person supposed to speak normally after witnessing something that feels heaven sent?
You have no idea what your existence does to people like me.
People who were surviving just fine until someone like you made survival feel too small a word.
So one day, when the world has exhausted us both and time has turned our memories golden, I will sit down and write about you properly. About your eyes. Your soul. Your terrifying softness. The way being loved by you feels like standing in sunlight after years of cold.
I will write a book about you. And when I do, I will describe you as divine.
Her eyes were the kind you do not just look at; you fall into them and never really climb back out. They had that color of honey mixed with dusk. A warmth that holds you without asking. A light that hurts and heals all at once. When she looked up, the whole garden changed its breath. The world seemed to tilt toward her, as if everything in it was trying to get just a little closer.
