@yoki._.gauw

I used to wonder what unseen hand persuades the stars to wander into one another’s skies, what secret the rivers keep when their waters become one. Somewhere in the unspoken hours, I had imagined you a thousand different ways. And yet you came without the courtesy of a prophecy, quietly, as light enters a room that never knew it was waiting. Since then, I have been both the adult I am becoming and the child I have not outgrown. Some nights, a tempest, all thunder and trembling skies. Others, a stone, unmoved by the pleading of the sea. And you, you have never asked the storm for silence, nor the stone to surrender its shape. I once mistook love for a doorway, believing that to enter was to leave the world behind. But you were a window. Beyond you, the world remained: the laughter, the wine, the wild and foolish hours, the thousand little freedoms that have always belonged to me. Nothing was taken. Nothing had to be surrendered. And still, somewhere between the open sky and all the roads I might have followed, I began to wish the wind would carry me toward you. How strange, the tenderness and tyranny of time. Apart, the hours gather like winters upon the windowsill. Together, whole afternoons vanish before the light can learn your face. I have grown fond of the things no poet would think to name: your heavy eyelids waging their small war against the night; the distant roar of a match, your eyes held captive by the screen, and my ridiculous jealousy of a game that knows nothing of me. The way affection finds you when you are not trying to be tender. The way you are simply there, unarranged, unguarded, belonging first to yourself. And perhaps that is what I love. Not the reflection of myself I find in your eyes, nor the promise of being adored. But the quiet, unborrowed light of a life that is entirely yours. I would not have you become the shape of my longing. I would only have you remain yourself. We have scarcely known the turning of a season. There are still continents of silence between the things we have told each other, whole constellations we have yet to discover. And I cannot tell whether the same moon will always find us together. Perhaps the sea will change its mind. Perhaps the stars will drift beyond the reach of one another’s light. But I will not ask tomorrow to swear an oath that only today can keep. For now, there is your name resting softly in the hours, and a window I no longer wish to close. The world is still wide. The sky is still mine. I have not forgotten how to fly. Only now, when the evening wind begins to rise, there is somewhere I find myself wishing to land. And if one day the seasons carry us apart, let the wind remember what I have not yet learned to say: I loved you not because you were mine, but because, for a little while, the world was kind enough to let me know you.

On the profile · Nov 2, 2026