PagesintheDark

Ever since the first day I sat beside you,

and we spoke like the world had paused,

I’ve been looking for you in every room

even the ones I know you’ll never walk into.

Since the first night we shared a bed,

sleep hasn’t belonged to me the same way.

My body doesn’t rest without yours nearby,

as if it learned your presence

and refuses to forget it.

Every day that passes,

no matter the season of our lives,

no matter the distance or the arguments,

you are still the one I want to run to.

For the good news.

For the laughter.

For the ache that needs somewhere safe to land.

I want to bring you my joy,

and my heaviness,

and even my silence.

To sit with you, saying nothing,

finding peace in the simple truth

that you are there.

It feels unreal how completely

you live in my heart and my mind.

How consuming it is.

How exhausting.

And yet,

now that I know this way of loving,

my body rejects any other.

Love feels like too small a word

for what I feel for you.

If I lived only in my mind,

I’d be twenty years ahead of today,

walking down roads that have not yet been built,

climbing hills that burn beneath my hands and feet,

chasing dreams I cannot yet see.

I’d search for smoother paths,

asking God to make my way lighter,

not realizing the weight of His plans was shaping me.

I would ignore my heart,

because feeling too much feels like a threat to my progress,

a delay in becoming who I think I should be.

My intentions are pure,

but in my mind I miss the truth of today. 

Twenty years may never come,

Tomorrow is a promise, not a possession.

hills may never rise before me,

stones may never shift beneath my feet.

Even in this mind built future,

even in my plans,

the present waits,

asking only to be lived.

I wanted to be an architect,

so I chose you.

Your hands became my plans,

your voice was the place I wanted to come home to.

So I started building. 

I built passionately,

even when I was tired.

Even when the walls started to lean.

Seasons changed.

And somehow,

I was holding a roof

with my bare hands

while you stood beneath it.

I kept fixing what kept breaking.

Kept believing in what kept fading.

Until I realized,

a house cannot stand

if only one heart

is trying to save it.

So I stepped back,

And I watched it all collapse while feeling the ruins in my skin. 

What we built was real.

It was beautiful.

It just wasn’t meant

to last this way.

And someday,

I will build again

with someone who brings their own hands,

their own weight,

their own love

to hold the walls with me.

I don’t hate music.

But when the beat begins playing

it reminds me of when my heart followed

a rhythm that was only meant for you.

And when the artist sings,

my body reacts.

Goosebumps rise on my skin,

the same way they did under your touch.

Music pulls my emotions forward,

even the ones I thought I’d set down.

It’s meant to make people move,

but the last dance I wanted to remember

is the one we shared that night in the park.

Now, when music plays,

I grow quiet,

stuck in a time where we once loved.

What a devastatingly beautiful song we were.

The forest has a way to teach its own kind to survive 

to desperately protect the most raw parts of themselves

to show teeth

not from anger

but from trauma that has been cut and engraved into unhealed scars on their skin. 

There was a presence

in the underbrush. 

I could see him move

coated with weighted layers of fur.

He wore it mysteriously

like a mask. 

I watched him carefully from a distance. 

Not out of fear

but because I value the wide space between a thorn and bloom. 

He was not cruel. 

He was cautious.

The kind that won’t mistake gentleness for innocence.

He trusted only a few

but protected his pact with suppressed intensity.

It was with him I realized

not all wolves howl.

Some just watch

from the darkest places

and have made the choice to not chase. 

He will wait

tirelessly

until someone can understand the tongue of the forest

calmly sit beside him 

and not be afraid.