Text

Before love found me,
I had already met it
in borrowed places—

on television screens,
inside paperback pages,
between songs
that knew exactly
when two people
were supposed to fall.

I knew the choreography.

Two strangers meet.
The world grows quieter.
Rain arrives
with suspiciously perfect timing.

Somehow two people who met
three scenes ago
already know how to stay.

I had watched enough
to think I understood
the language of it.

Then love stepped
out of the screen
and into my life.

No soundtrack.
No script.
No director calling cut.

Only a person,
another person,

and the strange discovery
is that the heart
can recognise a feeling
long before the mind
knows what to do with it.

Suddenly,
the films did not seem
quite as foolish.

They had simply
left out the difficult parts.

For a while,

my feelings
were running the company.
My head had been
relegated to an advisory role.

My heart was CEO.
No board meeting.
No audit.
No accountability.

Eventually,
I had to take
the keys back.

I told myself:
Love,
you are a feeling.
A powerful one.
A beautiful one.
A dangerous one
when given too much authority.

You are part
of my life.
You are not
my entire life.

I can love someone
without losing myself.
I can desire closeness
without abandoning reason.
I can feel deeply
without handing
my entire identity
to another person.

Now I think of love
differently.
You may enter.

You may make me laugh
until I forget
what I was worried about.
You may make me soft
in places
I had kept guarded.

You may make
ordinary Tuesdays
feel worth remembering.

You may break my heart too.
And if you do,
I will grieve.
I will take my time.
I will admit
that it hurt.

But I will not
hand you my identity
along with my heart.

Love can sit beside me
without taking the wheel.
It can be part
of the life I am building
without becoming
the reason I build it.

I will love honestly.
I will give
what I can genuinely give.

I will stay
when staying is true.
I will leave
when leaving becomes
the honest thing to do.

Because I have finally
understood the difference
between loving someone
and disappearing inside them.

Love,
you are welcome here.
You may touch my life.
You may change me.
You may even leave
a little tenderness
behind when you go.

But you do not get
the keys to my life.
I have a life
to live beyond you.
And I intend
to remain in it.

I will love.
I will feel.
I will give.

But I will remember
whose life
I am living.