#romantic prose

[written-with-coffee]

I don’t want someone who would die for me, but someone who would live for me.

Living for someone asks for dedication, presence, and commitment. The daily choice to care, to respect, and to grow side by side.

Love is not sacrifice. It’s responsibility.

[f-around-n-find-out]

Even if you did not love me I could not help an entire devotion to you: how much more deeply then must I feel for you knowing you love me. My Mind has been the most discontented and restless one that ever was put into a body too small for it. I never felt my Mind repose upon anything with complete and undistracted enjoyment—upon no person but you. When you are in the room my thoughts never fly out of window: you always concentrate my whole senses.

Excerpt of a letter from poet John Keats to Fanny Brawne in 1820

[home-for-artists]

Okay but despite everything, this is love.

"I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me."

[isolated-ink]

Take me where the forest meets the ocean

In her mind, she could almost see him. A figure in the shadows, watching her with quiet, steady eyes. There was something about him that felt safe, yet dangerous all at once. Not the kind of danger that would hurt her, but the kind that came from carrying his own pain, his own battles. His presence felt like a warm fire on a cold night, comforting, but with a power she couldn’t ignore.

She imagined the way he’d hold her, not to keep her trapped but to remind her she wasn’t alone. He wouldn’t need grand words or promises; his actions would speak for him. A warm hand on hers, a hug that lasted just long enough to chase the shadows away. Even in silence, she would feel it: “I’m here. I see you.”

But she couldn’t ignore the darkness in him, either. It wasn’t cruel or selfish, it was the kind of darkness that came from surviving hard things, the same kind she carried in herself. It scared her a little, but it also made her feel less alone.

[crucifiedhereticprincess]

in ways only you would recognize

I stand in the stillness where intention gathers breath and let the quiet teach my pulse the architecture of devotion. Not something I fall into, but something I maintain. Something I choose with full awareness of what it asks of me.

Time does not weigh on me. I move through it, threading fidelity into ordinary decisions until even my habits begin arranging themselves around you. Not dramatically. Not all at once. The way rivers alter landscapes. The way roots move foundations without ever appearing to hurry.

My mind keeps finding you. Not because I command it to, but because attention develops its own pathways. The black screen of my phone after a conversation ends. The reflection in a store window. The few suspended seconds before sleep arrives. Every surface develops a habit of you.

I speak in sentences that bend toward you, restrained on purpose, because some things become smaller when explained too quickly. I have never trusted urgency with what matters most. Urgency consumes. Reverence observes.

I am not drawn by command. I am aligned, and alignment settles deeper than language. Something in me responds before analysis arrives to interrogate it. Before reason begins naming parts and assigning categories. Recognition moves first.

The quiet you leave behind behaves strangely. It does not remove you. It redistributes you. A phrase returns hours later. A memory appears in the middle of a task. A moment repeats itself from another angle. The room remains occupied by echoes that never announce themselves as echoes.

I trace devotion in the margins of my days. In small deliberate choices. In the discipline of attention. In the refusal to treat meaning as disposable simply because it is not visible. Everything becomes measured. Considered. Felt.

Even restraint possesses its own intimacy. There is a closeness that comes from patience. A form of care that refuses to consume what it values. The world mistakes possession for depth so often that people forget a thing can matter without belonging to them.

Distance does not weaken this. It refines it. Pressure turns carbon into something harder. Time reveals whether feeling was impulse or conviction. What remains after impatience leaves is usually the truth.

I do not lose myself in this. I refine myself through it. Into something capable of holding devotion without demanding possession. Something guarded and still open. Disciplined and still soft. Steady enough to carry feeling without forcing feeling to become proof.

I carry it carefully because it matters. Because some things deserve reverence rather than urgency.

You choose me in ways you would recognize even without being told. Not because you have to. Not because devotion requires reciprocity to exist. But because certain truths reveal themselves through consistency rather than declaration. Through presence rather than performance. Through what remains when speaking would be easier.

Every word I write is deliberate. Every pause intentional. Every restraint a decision rather than an absence. I do not measure this by grand gestures. I measure it by constancy. By attention. By the accumulation of a thousand quiet moments that eventually become certainty.

This is the kind of devotion that settles low and steady, aware of itself and unafraid of its own weight. The kind that can sit in silence without mistaking silence for distance. The kind that does not need constant reassurance to remain true. The kind that does not need to touch to be felt.

It remains.

Patient.

Deliberate.

Certain.

Like a foundation buried beneath a house.

Like a current moving beneath still water.

Like a truth that survives translation.

The kind of devotion that stays long after the room has emptied, long after the conversation has ended, long after language has exhausted its explanations.

The kind that becomes part of the architecture.

The kind that remains.

The kind that teaches memory how to keep its promises.

[some-sort-of-mess]

Midnight

by B. Henderson

---

You and me— a star-filled sky. Looking for constellations. Your hand brushes my shoulder, warm. "There's the Little Dipper." You point, smiling, delighted. I glance, nod. I'm watching you. These stars mean nothing without you.

We stay out late, waiting for the Big Dipper to shift into our point of view. We lay in dew-wet grass. The blades are cold, itchy. It's worth it to hold your hand. The stars do shift. We forget about the Big Dipper.

I smile at you and point out how beautiful the moon is. You tell me that I am beautiful. We stand. We kiss. You check the time. "Better head inside, it's almost midnight."

---

Written for the prompt "Midnight" by @thenightquill hosted by @picklemafia

It's not so much a poem, I don't think, but I hope you enjoy reading it just the same.

[bhavna-writes]

The Girl Next Door

The birds resumed chirping, the glass room displaying the miniature garden through the blinds. Plucking oranges to uphold the market’s legacy of the national fruit. Olivia had woken up earlier than usual.

The light tapping of feet on the porch was made out. Nursing the olives — rather fresh for this month — while the rest of the neighbourhood were allergic to her unmatched enthusiasm. In spite of that, Olivia and yearning likely maneuvered into happy hours.

The tagline girl next door was imprinted on her. Morning playlist reduced to a volume incapable of disturbing a flatmate.

“Oopsie daisy.” A pot displaced. Gathering the item, rearranging it on the balcony, earning a pat on the back.

August had misplaced her room number in his passwords folder. When he visited, the numbers used to come to him like mental math. Gently fed, mixing dough — the sugar melted into her nuzzles.

The living room — a hideout for binge-watching House of Guinness. Newspapers unmarred on the foyer. He cherished how she giggled when resting on his shoulder.

They dated for a brief patch. He retired to his apartment when it concluded. The breakup invited anticipated questions.

We had other priorities — an expected response.

If only they had been informed about how Olivia drenched his sweatshirt, sobbing muffled. His conscience prodded:

Only an idiot would let her go.

The wimp as he was, August did.

Hibernation elapsed. The lily barrette he tucked into her pashmina loosely clung on.

“I want Olivia back.”

[achyutpriya]

हाथ सराबोर हो गए मेरे आंसू पोछते,

आप पलकों का लिहाज़ करते हैं?