There are a few minutes, right before I am fully awake, where I am not asleep but not yet present either. that thin space between. and in that space, without choosing it, without summoning it, you arrive.

Not as an image. I don’t picture your face or construct a scene. it is softer than that and more total. it is your name. your entity. the simple fact of you, sitting in my head before my eyes have adjusted to the light. and I start talking. not to you exactly, more like about you, to myself, the way you speak when no one is listening and the words don’t need to perform for anyone. I tell myself how much I love you. I tell myself how strange and full it feels to carry this. it is not a conversation. it is closer to a confession I keep making to no one, every morning, maybe because I have not yet found a better place to put it.

Maybe it is not healthy. maybe loving someone this completely, this automatically, before you are even conscious enough to decide anything, is too much. but I think I earned this. I was empty ,I was numb my whole life. not numb the way people use the word casually, but genuinely hollowed out by the weight of a love I refused to admit because I knew, I knew, that admitting it meant there was no walking it back. that once I let myself feel it fully there would be no version of me that existed before it. and that terrified me more than anything. so I kept it at arm’s length. I kept myself at arm’s length. and it cost me three years of pretending I was fine with less.

This is not a gentle love. it is not the quiet comfortable kind that sits in the corner and waits patiently. it is the kind that takes up the whole room. the kind that moves through your body before your mind has a say. the kind that is there before you are fully awake, in the minutes when you are most honest, when the performance of the day has not yet begun and all that exists is what is actually true.

You are what is actually true.

My first thought. my only one. every morning, every midnight, every time consciousness returns and brings you with it. I don’t fight it anymore. I don’t think I could even if I wanted to. and I don’t want to. I love your existence, my first, one and only.