There are people who will drift in and out of your life like blundering smoke, and then there are all of you, who linger like a sudden song getting stuck in your head, soft and steady, refusing to fade.
This is for you.
For the way you've learned the language of my silences, how you've sat beside me when my thoughts tangled into something nameless - you didn't demand clarity, or turn away. You listened - not just to what I said, but to everything I couldn't. And somehow, that feels like being understood in its purest form.
For the way you love me with intention, not assumption. The way you ask, and ask again, as if I am in a story still worth reading. You trace the small details I forget to mention, hold onto the fragments of who I am, and return them to me like something precious. There is something deeply romantic about being known this way, about being seen not as something fixed, but as something becoming.
For the tenderness of your acceptance. You have witnessed me in unfinished states - uncertain, unpolished, 95lbs and hair falling out the way temperatures drop at night, in the quiet mess of growing - and still, you chose to stay. Not despite it, but with it. You made space for all of my contradictions, like they belonged. Like I belonged.
And for the way you show up, again and again. In ways both loud and quiet. In late night conversations that stretch into delicate territories, in ephemeral messages that somehow carry weight, in the gentle gravity of your presence. Loving you, being loved by you, feels less like a moment and more like a rhythm - steady, grounding and real. This is what holds me together in the lost moments, the moments where I feel ready to implode.
Without you, I would be a walking perpetual guttural howl.
So my offering back to you is this, imperfect but full: gratitude, admiration, and something that leans, just slightly, into romance. Because there is a beauty in the way we have chosen each other. Not all at once, but slowly and deliberately. Something meant to last.
Thank you. I love you.