You Can Keep the Beginning

You ask if I’d go back—
back to the tentative hush
of first meetings,
to the flicker of maybe,
to the days we hovered on the edge
of becoming.

And though the memory is soft—
a page I still turn with care—
I wouldn’t return to it.
Not for the shiver of newness,
not for the thrill of discovery,
not even for the ease
of not yet knowing
how much would be asked of us.

Because there is a kind of love
you cannot yet hold at the beginning.
It lives in the marrow of the after.

The you I loved then
was unknowable,
glowing with potential,
beautiful in the way distant stars
are beautiful—
untouched, unreachable,
promising light but not yet warmth.

But the you I love now—
you are constellation and compass.
Flesh and breath and
every small, sacred knowing
carved quietly over thirteen years
of staying.
Of returning.
Of becoming something
stronger than longing.

Ours is a love not etched in grand gestures,
but in quiet accumulations—
the way your hand finds mine
in sleep.
The way your silence sounds
when it means “I’m here.”
The way you look at me
like I am the story you chose
even after learning all the hard chapters.

I would not trade
the ache of growing through you
for the flimsiness of beginnings.
Would not relinquish
this weathered, iron-clad intimacy—
this love that has survived
not in spite of the fire,
but because of it—
for the delicate flutter of what once was.

There are things we know now
that cannot be unknowingly held.
There is a weight to this love
that makes it holy.

So no—
you can keep the beginning.
Let it stay folded in time,
perfect in its fragility.
I’ll be here,
where we are anchored,
where we are known,
where the story deepens,
line by line,
into something
that can no longer be undone.