#alim

You are my country of maybes.

Not a man, not really—

a door left half-open in a storm house, slamming between yes and no until the hinges forget which side they belong to.

I built a kingdom from that sound.

A look. A word. Someday.

How small the bricks were, how eagerly I stacked them.

Soon there were entire cities balanced on your unfinished sentences. Cathedrals of possibility. White towers made from things you never actually promised.

I lived there for years.

In that place you reached for my hand without hesitation. In that place your face turned toward mine like a flower recognizing the sun.

In that place I never had to wonder.

Reality stood outside, knocking politely.

I did not answer.

Because reality came carrying receipts. Reality knew the arithmetic.

You do not call. You do not ask. You do not choose.

And still I fought it.

What a strange war: one man defending a castle against the truth.

The truth never even raised its voice.

It only pointed at the empty chair.

Look, it said.

Look again.

I think that is what hurts most— not that you were cruel, but that hope is such a gifted sculptor.

It carved entire futures from a handful of dust.

And I loved the statue so fiercely that I forgot to ask whether the man beneath it existed.

Tell me:

Do you live there too?

In some private country where impossible things survive?

Do you also love shadows better than daylight?

Or is that only me—

You arrived when my life had already begun folding inward.

The days were gray fish floating belly-up in dark water. I had stopped asking the future for anything.

Then you said maybe.

Such a small word.

A match head. A seed. A splinter of light.

You will never know what that word did to me.

I took it home carefully. Fed it. Protected it from doubt.

I built an entire cathedral around your maybe.

When you are drowning, you do not examine the rope.

You grab it.

And now I keep asking myself the same impossible question:

How do I turn hope into reality?

How do I transform your uncertainty into certainty?

How do I become the version of myself that you would choose?

I circle these questions endlessly, like a moth convinced there must be a way through the glass.

Maybe I am too... Too needy. Too broken.

Maybe there is some fatal flaw buried in me that everyone sees immediately except myself.

So I search.

I excavate my own soul looking for defects.

Meanwhile you are somewhere else entirely— laughing, sleeping, living— your days untouched by the gravity that governs mine.

And still I defend you.

It has become reflex.

I explain your silences. Excuse your absences. Translate indifference into misunderstandings.

I have become your attorney against the evidence of my own heart.

Perhaps you would say you never promised anything.

Perhaps you would say I misunderstood.

That we were reading different books while standing in the same room.

And maybe that is true.

But what am I supposed to do with the words you gave me?

I carved them into myself.

Your possibility became scripture.

Now everyone tells me to let go.

As if hope were a switch.

As if love could be evicted by logic.

As if I could simply abandon the thing that kept me alive.

You tell me we can stop.

You tell me I do not have to continue if it hurts.

And that is how I know you do not understand.

Because for you it is an option.

For me it became a reason.

A reason to wake up. To improve. To imagine a future.

Without it, I am left standing in the ruins of possibilities, counting all the lives I failed to live.

And perhaps that is the deepest wound:

Not that you do not love me.

But that I cannot stop believing that if I were somehow different— better, brighter, worthier—

you would.

So I remain here, caught between faith and reality,

holding a candle that burns lower every year,

still unable to decide

whether it is guiding me home

or slowly consuming me.

I was telling my friend about how happy I am that I will get to see you.

About the airport delays, the ruined schedules, the ridiculous mathematics of longing— hours of travel collapsing into only two brief hours beside you.

And I was smiling while saying it.

Smiling.

Because two hours with you still felt miraculous enough to reorganize an entire day around.

But my friend frowned the way sensible people do.

She counted the distance out loud: the drive there, the waiting, the exhaustion of returning home half-empty again.

She said it like it was sacrifice.

And I remember blinking at her with genuine confusion.

Sacrifice?

No.

Sacrifice is giving something up for nothing.

This feels like purpose.

The world sharpens when I am moving toward you. Roads become meaningful. Train stations glow. Even inconvenience acquires romance.

I thought of that time you were stranded five hours away and how instinctively I wanted to come to you— not for a grand declaration, not even for a night together—

just to say hello. Just to see your face briefly under unfamiliar city lights.

How strange love is.

How two people can examine the exact same circumstance and see opposite truths.

My friend saw effort. I saw devotion.

She saw imbalance. I saw direction.

Because before you, my life felt like a room where someone had forgotten to turn on the lights.

Now even waiting feels alive.

Even sitting in traffic, checking arrival times obsessively, holding coffee gone cold in my hands— all of it hums with meaning because somewhere at the end of it is you.

And maybe that is dangerous.

Maybe no person should become another person’s compass so completely.

But still— there is something beautiful about loving someone enough that distance stops feeling heavy.

I keep trying to shrink my love into something less alarming.

Fold it smaller. Quieter. Something I can place gently in your hands without you mistaking it for a chain.

Because the truth is enormous.

It follows me everywhere— through grocery stores, through sleepless nights, through every ordinary moment your absence has sharpened.

And I am afraid that if I tell you the full weight of it, you will step back instinctively like someone opening a door to find a fire already inside the room.

So I measure myself carefully around you.

I soften my voice. Swallow certain sentences whole. Pretend I need less than I do.

Not because my feelings are weak, but because they are frighteningly alive.

How do I tell you that my care for you has roots now? Deep ones.

That your sadness alters entire days in me. That your happiness feels strangely tied to my own survival.

How do I say this without making you feel responsible for keeping me alive?

Because I do not want your pity. I do not want guilt to masquerade as tenderness. I do not want you trapped inside the gravity of my longing.

I just want you to understand.

To know that when I ask if you got home safely, when I notice the exhaustion in your eyes, when I memorize the smallest changes in your voice—

it comes from a place so sincere it terrifies me sometimes.

And maybe that is the cruelest part of love:

that real devotion can resemble pressure when it is not returned equally.

So I stand here holding oceans inside my mouth, trying to offer you only a cupful at a time.

Carefully. Carefully.

As if honesty itself might scare you away.