Separate Storms

To the woman this life has prepared me for.

The woman who will choose me,

as completely as I will choose her.

I do not know your name.

I do not know what city you call home.

I do not know whether tonight has been kind to you.

But I know this.

Somewhere beneath this same indifferent sky,

there is a heartbeat I have been protecting without ever hearing it.

You have never met me,

yet every scar has been shaping the way I will love you.

Every betrayal has taught me what I refuse to become.

Every lonely night has become another stone in the walls I will build around your peace.

I once mistook the war inside me for waste.

It wasn’t.

It was construction.

One day,

you will stand inside everything it built.

You will never have to wonder whether you are too much.

The stars themselves could ask for my attention,

and I would still turn toward you.

Not because the world became smaller…

but because you became my world.

I will never ask you to become less so I can feel like more.

I have no desire to own your soul.

I have no interest in rescuing you.

I already believe in your strength.

I already believe in the woman you became long before I ever arrived.

I only hope to become the place where neither of us has to carry the weight of the world alone.

Go wherever your heart calls you.

Chase every impossible dream.

Become someone neither of us recognizes ten years from now.

I will not stand in your way.

I will never mistake your independence for distance.

I will walk beside you until my shadow disappears beneath yours.

And if the world ever forgets how precious you are,

it will have to explain itself to me.

If grief reaches for your shoulders,

it will find my hands there first.

If fear knocks at your door,

it will discover me waiting, unshaken.

If darkness ever mistakes your light for something it can extinguish,

it will learn what it means to meet a man who has already survived the night.

I have no interest in dying for you.

That would only take a moment.

I intend to live for you.

To wake every morning and choose you so completely

that the decision becomes indistinguishable from breathing.

But if this world ever demanded a life in exchange for yours…

I would not hesitate.

It would simply be the first thing that ever needed to get through me.

I have spent enough years watching those around me face battles they should never have faced alone.

You won’t.

Not while I still have a pulse to place between yours and the things that would stop it.

You will never have to earn my tenderness.

Never have to negotiate for my loyalty.

Never have to perform for my affection.

You will never have to question where I stand.

Look beside you.

I am there.

Look behind you.

I am there.

Look toward whatever horizon frightens you most.

You will find me already staring it down.

The strange thing is…

I have carried this love for someone I have never met

longer than most people have carried love for those they already have.

It has survived tribulations that almost broke me.

It has outlived hope.

It has outlived grief.

It has outlived every person who taught me what love was not.

And somehow…

it is still reserved for you.

Untouched.

Unspent.

Uncorrupted.

Wherever you are,

sleep peacefully tonight.

There is a man you have never met,

who has already made peace with what love will ask of him.

So if this world ever decides

to become cruel to you,

it will have to walk through me first.

Until then…

keep walking through your storm.

I’ll keep walking through mine.

Somewhere ahead,

the sky belongs to both of us.

We will find each other.