#disapointed

She did not want to be a footprint in melting snow,

a brief thing,

beautiful only because it disappeared.

She wanted to be the scent that lingered

long after the rain had left the earth.

The song caught in his ribs.

The name that arrived uninvited

in the quiet hours between midnight and morning.

She wanted to be the tide beneath his thoughts.

The gravity.

The pull.

The thing he could not explain

without sounding a little like a poet

or a fool.

She had no interest in being collected.

Pressed between the pages

of a life already moving on.

She wanted to be kept.

Not possessed—

kept the way a man keeps a letter

he cannot bear to throw away.

The way he reaches for a memory

just to feel it breathe again.

She wanted devotion that bloomed in silence.

In lingering glances.

In remembered details.

In the sacred noticing of small things.

The curve of her smile.

The music of her laugh.

The way her eyes wandered toward distant horizons

when her heart was somewhere else entirely.

And if he loved her,

let it be with the terrible certainty

of roots seeking water.

Let it be the kind of longing

that survived distance,

survived seasons,

survived the easy forgetting

that carried so many things away.

She had been temporary before.

A chapter.

A passing storm.

A name softened by time.

Now she wanted to be inevitable.

The place his thoughts returned to

when the world grew quiet.

The ache.

The prayer.