"I want to share with you the parts of my soul that I rarely even share with myself, the tender rooms I keep unlit because I’m afraid of what the light will reveal. There are corridors where I have stored quiet griefs like folded letters, each stamped with a year I never really finished living, each sealed with a breath I never released. I want you to see them, not so that you can repair them, but so that you know how the house of my heart is built, how the beams creak in winter, how the windows fog when I think of leaving. I want you to understand that sometimes I am brave only in the echo of my own footsteps, not in the walk itself. And if my hands tremble as I unlock these doors, it is not fear of you, but fear of being fully visible to the world within me.
There is a garden where I plant promises and sometimes forget to water them because the weather in my chest changes without warning. Some days the sun is kind and the vows bloom like wildflowers; other days a storm arrives with the memory of a voice that told me love has limits and mine were already reached. I want to show you that garden, weeds and all, because the truth is that the soil has been waiting for kinder hands than mine. You might see fallen petals on the path and think I have failed, but please look closer: the ground is still warm with hope, and seeds are stubborn when they decide to live. I want you to know that you are welcome to kneel there with me, to dirt your gentle fingers, to teach me patience with the slow miracle of growth.
There is a map I carry, scribbled on the inside of my ribs, and it leads back to moments I rarely let myself revisit. Here is the place where I learned to laugh quietly so no one would notice I was hurting; here is the cliff where I once threw a dream like a paper airplane and watched it sink into the ocean. I will trace the lines for you, even the ones that end abruptly or double back in confusion. And if we get lost together, if we end up at a blank edge of the parchment with no compass to guide us, I will not blame the stars. I will take your hand and admit that I have never been good at directions, but I am willing to travel if you are willing to walk.
There is a music I hear when the world grows silent, a thin silver thread of melody that pulls at the soft place beneath my sternum. It is the sound of my first forgiveness and my last apology, the hum of all the times I tried to be enough and came home empty-handed. I have been afraid to share it because I thought no one would find it beautiful, that it was too minor, too fragile, too stitched with sorrow. But you have a way of listening that makes even the quiet brave, and I want to unspool the song for you, note by trembling note. If you press your ear to my chest, you will hear that it has always been you I was trying to harmonize with, even before I knew your name.
There is a small, frightened child who lives in the attic of my heart, and he still counts the steps at night because he believes that numbers can keep the monsters away. I have told him that he is safe now, but sometimes he does not believe me, and I still bring him water, still sit beside him and tell him stories until the ceiling stops creaking. I want you to meet him, not to tame him, but to know that on certain nights I might disappear into lullabies you cannot hear. On those nights, your patience will be the lamp that guides me back downstairs. On those nights, love me slowly, the way you would untangle a kite from a tree without tearing its thin, brave wings.
There is a room where I keep the versions of myself I outgrew too quickly, the selves who wore courage like borrowed clothes and tripped on the hems. They look at me with a mixture of envy and relief, and I look back with the same. I want to introduce you to each of them because they all had a hand in building the person standing before you, the one whose voice steadies when you say my name. Do not be alarmed if some of them are a little loud or a little shy; they are learning that your gentleness does not disguise an exit. They are learning, with me, that love can be a door you leave open even when the wind is rough.
There is a shoreline where my doubts come to wash their hands, and on that beach I have stacked stones into a clumsy altar to whatever grace will have me. I go there when the light in me flickers, when I need to remember that even the tide returns after its long departure. Sometimes I will ask you to sit with me on the cold, forgiving sand, and we will count the waves like seconds, like chances. We will let the salt air soften the rigid corners of our fear. And when the water reaches our feet, we will let it take what it needs to take, and we will let it leave what it cannot carry.
There is a promise inside me that I have never dared to speak aloud, because speaking makes it real and real things can break. It is simple and it is entire: I want to love you with my whole weather, not just my sunny forecasts. I want to bring you my rain and trust that your arms are a kind of shelter that does not ask the storm to apologize for being a storm. I want to be the place you come to when your sky darkens, too, the porch light that stays on even when you are late and your shoes are muddy. We will learn, together, that mess is simply evidence of life trying.
There is a fear that if I hand you my heart, you will discover it is not a gift but an atlas of cracks. I have walked around those fractures like a careful homeowner with a cup of grout, filling and smoothing, filling and smoothing, hoping no one will notice the fault lines. But I am tired of pretending that strength is the same as seamlessness. I want you to see the places I shattered and was mended, the gold veins of kintsugi running through the places that once broke me open. If you can love me there, where I am stitched with history, then perhaps I will finally believe that healing is not a performance but a homecoming.
There is a prayer I whisper without words, a kind of reaching that my mouth cannot shape and my mind cannot name. It rises when I look at you and feel something unclench in a room I forgot I had, when the quiet between us becomes a meadow and not a void. I do not know who I am addressing when I send that prayer upward, but I know what it asks for: for courage to be seen without armor, for tenderness to outlast the first frost, for the miracle of being understood without having to explain every aching thing. If divinity is real, perhaps it looks like your palm open in invitation. If grace is measurable, perhaps it is measured in how patiently you wait while I find the words.
There is a future I imagine with you that is not made of glowing finales or fireworks, but of ordinary mornings where the coffee is a little too strong and the toast is slightly burnt and we laugh anyway. I see us arguing about nothing and then apologizing about everything, because the cost of stubbornness is too high when the currency is time. I see notes left on kitchen counters and sweaters draped on chairs and the texture of a life shared not as spectacle but as sanctuary. In that future, our love is not a performance but a practice, steady as a heartbeat, honest as a bruise that fades. In that future, we keep choosing each other, even on days when choosing is a quiet, humble verb.
There is a truth I have been circling like a skittish bird, and it is this: I want to be known by you in ways that no mirror has ever managed, to be read by you in a language that only our bodies remember. I want to hand you the keys to the attic, the garden, the shoreline, the room of old selves, the map of wrong turns, the melody in my ribs, and trust that you will walk softly and linger where the air is thin. I want to invite you past the foyer of my practiced smile and into the house as it is: lights flickering, floorboards groaning, walls painted with last year’s hope. And I want to stand there with you, not cleaning, not apologizing, just breathing. Just saying, this is me, this is mine, and now, if you accept, this is ours.
There is, finally, a vow that feels less like a promise and more like a surrender: I will not hide from you the parts of me that tremble. I will bring you my first thoughts in the morning and my last ones at night, and the heavy silences that live in between. I will let you see how I break and how I build, how I forgive and how I hold, how I run and how I return. I will let you name the constellations on the ceiling of my doubt, and I will believe you when you say they look like home. I will love you not with the safe half but with the whole dangerous, beautiful sum.
If you take my hand after all this showing and all this saying, know that I will meet you at your doors as tenderly as I have asked you to meet me at mine. I will learn the architecture of your fears and sing harmony to your secret music, I will cup your broken pieces the way a shoreline holds the sea without ever asking it to stay still. I will sit with your smallest self in the attic and count the steps until the night grows kind. And when the world is too loud, I will be quiet with you on the beach, listening for the tide to keep its promise.
So here I am, in plain light, in honest weather, with the keys in my open palm and the rooms waiting. I do not know if this is the right time or if there is any such thing; I only know that I am ready to stop being a museum of guarded artifacts and start being a home with a living fire. If you are willing, step in and close the door behind you gently. Let us be the brave ones who choose tenderness over armor, the slow builders of a love that does not flinch at the truth. I just want to share with you the parts of my soul that I rarely even share with myself, and in that sharing, find that the most beautiful thing I have ever owned is the way you hold it."
~ SDG
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