I keep rereading what I wrote and I do not know if I sound like a man confessing love or a man trying to explain why he should not be allowed to. You make everything in me feel louder. Not kinder. Just louder. Like the parts I buried did not disappear, they only learned your name. I am used to being looked at like a warning sign. Like something you stand too close to and regret later. But you… you look at me like I am still becoming something instead of something already finished. That confuses me more than anything else. I do not know what I am supposed to do with gentleness when it is given freely. I keep expecting it to have terms. I keep waiting for you to take it back and tell me it was a mistake to ever see me clearly. But you do not. And that is worse, in some ways. Because it leaves me responsible for what I become next. If I am honest, I do not think I understand love the way people describe it. I understand presence. I understand staying. I understand hands that do not flinch. You stay. I think that is what is breaking me open, not the idea of being loved, but the fact that you continue to do it without asking me to be smaller first. I do not know what name to give that. If I am a ruined thing, then you are the first person who did not try to fix me by erasing the damage. You just… sat beside it. So I will keep calling it you. And if there is something in me that is worth anything at all, I think it is learning how to stay when I want to run. I am still afraid you will wake up one day and see what I see when I look at myself. But for now, I will let you be wrong about me. It is the only kindness I know how to accept without turning it into something sharp.
