Beyond Language

I love you beyond anything this world has ever given me words for.

And perhaps that is the problem—

words.

What are words beside the cathedral of feeling you have built inside my chest?

What language could ever carry the weight of the way I see you?

Your beauty is not something I can simply describe.

It is something I witness.

Something that happens to me.

The way your face softens when you smile, the way your eyes seem to hold entire evenings, the way your voice reaches me like warm rain touching thirsty earth—

there are no words sufficient for you.

No sentence beautiful enough.

No metaphor vast enough.

You exist somewhere beyond language.

So when you ask me,

“How do you know you love me?”

I wish I could give you some magnificent answer.

Something poetic enough to convince every doubtful corner of your heart.

But the truth is simpler.

I don’t know.

I do not know how I know.

I simply do.

I know it the way the tide knows when to surrender itself to the moon.

I know it the way flowers turn toward light without ever being taught.

I know it the way night recognizes morning before the sun has even touched the horizon.

Something inside me recognizes something inside you.

As though my soul had known your name long before my mouth ever learned to say it.

And you—

you feel like rest.

Not sleep.

Rest.

The kind that comes when a tired soul finally realizes it no longer has to keep watch.

You feel like somewhere I could lay down every armor I have worn to survive.

Somewhere I could remove my heart from behind its ribs, place it trembling into your hands, and trust that you would hold it like something holy.

And in your hands, I imagine it becoming warm again.

First an ember.

Then a flame.

Then something golden and alive.

Not a fire that devours.

A fire that welcomes.

The kind that waits inside a home while rain beats against the windows.

The kind that turns winter into something survivable.

The kind that whispers,

you are safe here.

And my heart has wandered through winter for so long.

It remembers being shattered.

It remembers hands that did not know how gently a heart must be carried.

It remembers love that felt more like drowning than being held.

And still—

somehow—

it reaches for you.

Because when I think of you, the ghosts grow quieter.

The broken pieces inside me stop remembering that they are broken.

For a moment, I forget every place where love once wounded me.

And I remember instead what love was always supposed to feel like.

Warmth.

Shelter.

A hand I do not have to fear.

A heartbeat beside mine that does not ask mine to become smaller.

You make love feel less like survival and more like coming home after being lost for years.

So believe me or spend a lifetime doubting me.

I may never find the language that can fully prove this to you.

But I love you.

I love you in the quiet places.

In the spaces between conversations.

In the seconds before sleep when the world has gone silent and your name is still awake inside me.

I love you beyond possession.

Beyond distance.

Beyond whether life is kind enough to place your hand permanently inside mine.

Because some loves are not merely felt.

They become part of the body.

Part of the blood.

Part of the rhythm that keeps the heart remembering why it should continue beating.

And you—

you have become that rhythm in me.

So when you ask me how I know I love you,

perhaps this is the closest I will ever come to an answer:

because when the whole world exhausts me, you feel like rest.