Still, I Choose You
A river once asked the mountain, “If you know I must leave you, why do you still give me your snow?”
The mountain answered, “Because love is not measured by how long the water stays, but by what it becomes after passing through me.”
So I learned not every leaving is betrayal.
Some people are rain.
They arrive without permission, soften the earth, wake sleeping seeds, and disappear before the flowers learn their name.
But tell me—
was the rain unreal because the clouds moved on?
Was the garden foolish for blooming?
And yet,
there is another kind of love.
Not rain.
A well.
Something dug slowly through stone and stubborn earth.
Something two hands build because thirst will come again.
Perhaps this is where we confuse desire with devotion.
A flame may love the wick and still consume it.
A moth may call the fire beautiful while flying toward its own ending.
Not everything that burns for us was meant to keep us warm.
So what is love?
A door left open?
Or someone who keeps returning through it?
A bird uncaged?
Or the strange miracle of a bird with every sky available choosing the same windowsill each morning?
I think of us that way.
Two travelers finding the same lantern in a forest with no map.
You could have taken the east.
I could have taken the west.
Instead,
for one impossible stretch of darkness,
we walked beneath the same small light.
And perhaps that is enough for some stories.
But my heart has always been greedy for another kind of ending.
Not possession.
Not chains.
Something quieter.
The tree does not imprison the bird because the bird builds a nest there.
The shore does not own the sea because the tide returns.
The moon does not command the ocean, yet somehow the ocean keeps answering.
That is the love I understand.
Not—
“You are mine.”
But—
“You are free, and still you came back.”
Because anyone can love a sunrise.
The test is whether you remain when the sky forgets its colors.
Anyone can praise a garden in spring.
But who kneels beside the soil in winter and whispers,
“I remember what lives beneath you.”
That is where love becomes sacred.
Not in the first fire.
In the tending.
In the ash.
In the hands blackened from rebuilding the hearth.
And if one day you leave—
if the road divides us like a sentence God refused to finish—
I will not say you never loved me.
Some truths are too beautiful to be made cruel simply because they ended.
I will say:
there was once a house without walls,
and somehow I rested there.
There was once a language without words,
and somehow you understood me.
There was once a road with no promise of forever,
and somehow my feet still called it home.
But if the universe ever asks me the old riddle—
“What is love when no chain keeps it?”
I will answer:
A hand that could release mine,
but doesn’t.
A heart with a thousand doors,
that keeps one light burning.
A bird with the whole sky before it,
returning,
again,
and again,
to the same branch.
And if the riddle asks,
“Why?”
I will give it the only answer I have ever known:
Because out of every road that could have carried me away, still— I chose the one that led to you.