There was a time I learned what it was to feel alive.
Not loudly.
Not in a way that made noise in the world.
But quietly
like light moving through glass,
like breath finding its rhythm for the first time.
Always slightly ahead of me in height,
in presence,
in the way you spoke of faith
as though it lived inside your bones.
You asked me about Christ
and I hesitated in ways I didnāt yet understand,
nervous fingers hidden behind my back,
saying yes before I knew what I meant
because I knew I would see you again.
That was the truth of it.
Even then.
I did not only believe in you.
I went looking for you.
Every day became a kind of waiting.
Every absence a small ache I couldnāt yet name.
And when you said you had not dreamed of me,
I carried it quietly,
until one day you did,
and the world shifted slightly on its axis,
as if something unspoken had finally been seen.
You told me I was beautiful.
You said you had been hoping to see me for days.
And I, who had always been careful with my heart,
found myself unguarded in the simplest way
I wanted only to be where you were.
Under willow trees,
in the long hush of summer evenings,
in the spaces between conversation and silence,
I learned what it meant to feel chosen by presence alone.
She watched it unfold in the way mothers do
not as interruption,
but as story.
She would listen to me speak of you
as though I were returning from somewhere far away,
my voice carrying more light than it had before.
She understood something in him too
his gentleness,
his kindness,
the way he spoke like someone who carried both belief and struggle at once.
She did not turn me away from it.
She simply held it with me.
And when she placed my words into your hands
that small card saying I would not have what I have now without you
it felt like the story belonged to all three of us for a moment.
And I still hold that gently.
There were complexities too.
The distance of years between us.
The weight of faith.
The moments you stepped back,
and the moments you returned.
The quiet struggle in you that I did not yet understand.
But none of that erases what I felt.
Because what I remember most is not confusion.
It is being seen.
It is being looked for.
It is being known in a way that made the world feel wider.
And I am glad I left it where I did
before it became something heavier than memory,
before it lost its light.
Now it lives in me differently.
Not as something I reach for,
but as something I carry.
A willow tree.
A voice saying my name.
A mother smiling at the edges of my joy.
A man who stood within his faith and still made space for my becoming.
And somewhere between all of that,
a version of me
who learned, briefly,
what it feels like
to be completely, innocently,
and wholly alive.
theartofmadeline
2087
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