Welcome To My Odds and Ends

Durdle Door, Dorset, UK

I wasn't looking for love the way people claim they aren't looking for love while still checking the door every time it opens like it might be fate wearing a borrowed face

I had built my days like sealed rooms no drafts, no windows left cracked open just the quiet discipline of getting used to absence until it stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like structure

Love, I thought, was a language I'd already forgotten a rumor other people kept translating into music while I listened for something more useful like silence that didn't demand meaning

Then you walked in not like a storm, not like a revelation but like something that had always belonged there finally deciding to see

No thunder, no warning just the soft rearrangement of air as if the room itself exhaled and admitted it had been waiting

And suddenly my certainty felt thin like paper held too long over flame not destroyed, just reconsidering it's shape

I still don't know what to call it this interruption in my careful distance this undoing of all the ways I learned to be untouched

But I know I stopped looking for love the moment I realized it hadn't been something I was searching for

Heather flowers along the mountain stream - Isle of Skye, Scotland, August 2025

photo by: nature-hiking