There was a time when your longing for me would have sent me running. dependency, in any direction, was a door I kept locked from the inside. the responsibility of being someone’s shelter terrified me, not because I was cruel, but because I was convinced I would eventually fail at it, that I would promise warmth and deliver absence, that I would become the very disappointment I was afraid of being. and so the moment I sensed you leaning into me, or felt myself beginning to lean into you, something old and frightened in me would quietly slip out the back.

But something has changed. something surrendered. and I think it was the fear itself, finally exhausted from winning every time. Now when you show me those parts of yourself, the longing, the softness, the places where you need, I do not feel the familiar pull toward the exit. I don’t feel I want to disappear,I feel something steadier and stranger and far more mine. I feel the love surface and choose to stay. and for once I let it. I did not flinch. I did not run, I did not calculate the risk and decide the odds were bad. I simply stayed. and staying, I have learned, is its own kind of courage.

I want to save you now. not by pulling away and saving you from whatever I feared I was, from myself as I used to say, but by staying close enough that you never have to wonder if I will. I want to be the place you run toward and not away from. I want your happiness with a specificity that frightens even me, because it is no longer abstract, it is you, it is the alive version of you, the laughing version, the version that feels safe enough to need something. that version of you is everything. and if you are happy I am happy, it is that simple and that total, I would learn to love everything you love, even the things I never thought I had room for, even the quiet habits and the strange preferences and the corners of your world I have not yet visited.

I would learn them all. Your longing for me used to feel like a weight I was afraid to carry. now it feels like a direction. like something finally pointing me somewhere worth going. so run to me. I will be here, I will be steady, I will be the sacred place where you are whole, because I want to be everything to you, and for once in my life, I am not afraid of what that means.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​