Everyone wanted something from me. not maliciously, not always consciously, but the wanting was there in every interaction, a quiet demand underneath the warmth. love me back. see me. choose me. match what I am giving you. and I could feel it every time, the pressure of someone trying to pull a response out of me that I did not yet know how to give. I was not withholding. I was genuinely not there yet. and the harder they pulled, the further I went.

You didn’t pull.

You learned my language instead. I don’t know when you started or how, but somewhere along the way you figured out that the way to reach me was not to demand entry but to simply remain. to be there. consistently, without ultimatums, without a running tally of what you were owed. you never misunderstood me. not once. you never did something that made me feel cornered or obligated or managed. you just stayed. and staying, for someone like me, is the loudest possible declaration of love. it says I am not going anywhere.

I know it was not easy. I know what staying cost you. if it had been my choice from the beginning I would have pulled you in immediately, spared you the years of uncertainty, the moments where I disappeared and left you holding something I was not yet brave enough to hold myself. but it was not fully my choice. I was surviving things I still do not have complete words for. I was so disconnected from my own interior that acknowledging love felt like stepping onto unstable ground, like admitting something I could not take back. and I was not ready to not take it back.

But you knew. somehow you knew that nothing would reach me the way love could, and you were not selfish about it. you did not love me to get love back. you loved me because you could see I was losing faith in myself, losing the thread of who I was underneath all the avoidance and the armor. you loved me the way someone waters a plant they are not sure will survive, not for the reward of it, just because leaving it felt wrong. even when I hurt you. even when I left. you told your sister once that you could not go because I was alone. and when I heard that, something in me that had been locked for a very long time، opened.

How could I not love her. She never asked me to. never hinted at it، she hinted at commitment not fairy tale love. never made me feel the weight of what she was carrying on my behalf. she just spoke the language I had been waiting my whole life for someone to speak, the language of staying, of being present without conditions, of loving someone toward their own healing rather than toward your own comfort. and now I am on the other side of it. changed in the ways I did not think I was capable of changing. and I am learning, slowly and with everything I have, to speak that same language back to her.

To stay. to be there. to give her the world she never asked for but always deserved.