Let Me Be Your Rest

Let me be your rest.

Not merely the place you come when the world has worn you thin, but the place where you can finally collapse without apologizing for the sound your breaking makes.

Come to me when you have nothing left.

When your smile feels borrowed. When your laughter sounds like something your body remembers but your soul no longer understands. When you have spent so long surviving that you have forgotten what living is supposed to feel like.

I know you are tired.

I see it in the silences you leave between words.

I see it in the way your eyes sometimes wander somewhere far beyond me, as though part of you is still standing inside some old disaster, waiting for someone to come back and rescue you.

Maybe no one ever did.

So let me.

There are rooms inside you that have been abandoned for years.

I know.

Rooms where love once hung photographs on the walls before grief tore them down.

Rooms where promises still lie shattered across the floor.

Rooms you stopped entering because every step cuts.

Give me your hand.

We will walk through them together.

I will not ask you to clean them before I enter.

I will not turn away from the blood on the floor.

I will not ask why you kept the broken things.

I will simply sit beside you among everything that died there and remind you that ruins are still evidence that something once stood.

And perhaps something can stand again.

Let me kiss the places life taught you to hide.

Let me touch you with such tenderness that your body stops mistaking affection for danger.

Let my fingers trace every invisible scar without asking you who gave it to you.

I do not need names.

I only need you.

Open your heart to me.

I know the hinges scream.

I know every person who entered before me left fingerprints on the door.

I know part of you is terrified that I will walk through it, memorize where everything precious is kept, and one day become another thief.

Open it anyway.

Slowly.

One lock at a time.

Let mine meet yours in that frightening space between wanting to be loved and being terrified that someone finally might.

Let our hearts intertwine there.

Not beautifully.

Desperately.

Like roots beneath ruined earth, finding one another in the dark and deciding that somehow, despite everything buried above them,

they will still grow.

I do not want only the parts of you that know how to smile.

Give me your midnight.

Give me your silence.

Give me the thoughts you swallow before they become words.

Give me the nights when sadness sits on your chest and breathing becomes a negotiation.

Give me the anger you are ashamed of.

The exhaustion.

The emptiness.

The version of you that flinches when someone says, “I am staying,” because you have heard forever pronounced by temporary mouths before.

Give me that version.

Especially that version.

Let me hold you when you have forgotten how to hold yourself.

Let your head fall against my chest.

Let your tears soak through my shirt if they must.

Let your hands tremble.

Let your body finally stop performing strength.

You do not have to be brave here.

If the whole world has demanded armour from you,

take it off.

Piece by piece.

Lay every weapon at my feet.

You will not need them with me.

And when the darkness comes looking for you again,

come closer.

Closer.

Until my arms become the walls around you.

Until your sorrow has nowhere to sit except between us.

Until I know the rhythm of every broken breath.

Until the ghosts inside you realize there is someone else living here now.

Let me love you until loneliness understands it has overstayed its welcome.

Let me love you until your scars stop preparing themselves for another wound.

Let me love you until your body learns that hands can touch without hurting, voices can rise without becoming weapons, and closeness does not always end in abandonment.

I cannot promise to erase what happened to you.

Some memories do not die.

They become ghosts.

They learn the architecture of us.

They know which doors creak at midnight.

But when they come,

wake me.

Even if it is 3:17 in the morning.

Even if you cannot speak.

Reach across the darkness and find my hand.

Let that be enough.

Let my fingers close around yours and remind you:

you are here.

I am here.

The past is not in this room.

And if you have lost your purpose, do not force yourself to find it tonight.

Borrow mine.

For tonight, let my purpose be keeping you warm.

Tomorrow, let it be making you laugh.

The day after, perhaps reminding you to eat, to breathe, to step outside, to let sunlight touch the face you have hidden from it.

And one morning, without either of us noticing exactly when it happened,

you will begin wanting things again.

Small things first.

Coffee.

Rain.

Music.

Another sunrise.

Another night beside me.

And eventually,

your own life.

Until then,

borrow my hope.

I have enough for both of us.

Come to me exactly as you are.

Do not wash the darkness from your hands.

Do not sweep the broken glass from your soul.

Do not dress your wounds beautifully before showing them to me.

Come bleeding truth.

Come trembling.

Come unfinished.

Bring me the heart you believe has been ruined beyond repair.

Place it in my hands.

I will not promise to fix it.

Your heart is not some broken machine.

I will simply hold it.

Carefully.

Reverently.

As though someone placed the last warm thing in the universe between my palms and whispered,

do not let this go cold.

And I won't.

So when night gathers around us and you finally fall asleep against my chest,

listen.

Beneath your ear there will be a heartbeat.

Mine.

Steady.

Stubborn.

Alive.

Let it remind yours how to answer.

You are safe here.

You do not have to run.

You do not have to fight.

You do not have to earn tenderness.

You do not have to prove that you are worth staying for.

Just stay.

Let my arms become the border between you and every place that ever made you feel unwanted.

Let my love gather around you until even your ghosts lower their voices.

Until the darkness inside you stops calling itself home.

Until your heart no longer remembers what it was like to sleep outside itself.

And if morning finds us still tangled together,

let the first light crawl quietly across the ruins.

Let it touch every broken thing we refused to abandon.

Let it fall across your face while you sleep against me.

And when you wake,

before fear remembers your name, before yesterday reaches for you, before the world begins asking things of you again,

let my arms be the first truth your body remembers:

you are loved here.

You are wanted here.

You can rest here.

And if every road before me taught you that love eventually leaves,

then let me spend whatever time I am given teaching your heart something different.

You were never too damaged for tenderness.

Never too haunted to be held.

Never too broken to come home.