Yet I Wait

I have seen your heart.

Not the one you dress in daylight, not the one you teach to smile when someone asks if everything is all right.

I mean the other one—

the heart beneath the ribs, the one that speaks in trembling breaths and swollen eyes, the one you keep hidden because too many seasons have taught you that even tenderness can be made to feel dangerous.

So much time.

So many journeys around the sun with the same storm following you home.

So many winters you somehow learned to survive without ever calling yourself cold.

So many calendars turned quietly on the wall, each page carrying days no one else could see—

the words that cut, the silences that lingered, the nights when the storm inside you became too heavy for your body and slipped quietly through your eyes.

How much rain can a heart hold before the clouds finally break?

How long can a soul live beneath thunder before the weather begins showing in its eyes?

I have watched you say,

I’m fine.

And every time, something in me aches because I know how carefully those two words have been stitched together.

I know there are rooms inside you where you keep the things you cannot say aloud.

Pain folded into pain.

Memory laid upon memory.

Little funerals for pieces of yourself you had to bury just to make it through another day.

And sometimes the grave becomes too full.

The earth gives way.

The sky inside you opens.

And everything you buried rises at once—

until your heart, with nowhere else to bleed, finds your eyes.

And there,

beneath your lashes,

it rains.

That is when I see you most.

Not because your sorrow makes you weak,

but because for a moment the walls cannot hide what your heart has been carrying.

And God—

how I wish I could be there.

Not to save you.

Not to stand before you like some hero and pretend I understand every room you have survived.

I only want to sit beside you.

Close enough that you do not have to hide the shaking in your hands.

Close enough that when you whisper,

I’m fine,

you can look into my eyes and know you do not have to be fine with me.

You do not have to perform strength.

You do not have to make your pain smaller so that I can carry it comfortably.

You do not have to apologize for the rain after living beneath a sky that has forgotten how to clear.

You told me the pain was too much.

Too much to open.

Too much to give another person.

Too much for anyone to understand.

But I never wanted all of it.

Give me one corner of the weight.

One stone from the mountain.

One midnight storm.

One trembling confession.

You carry what you can.

I will carry what you allow me.

And whatever remains, we can sit beside it together until it stops feeling quite so enormous.

Because I see the walls.

One.

Two.

Perhaps three.

Maybe all that time has built more than either of us could count.

Brick by brick.

Disappointment by disappointment.

Every time your heart opened and learned another reason to close itself again.

So I understand why you hide behind them.

I understand why you are afraid when someone asks to come closer.

But somehow,

I still see you.

Through the small cracks you forget to cover.

The kindness that escapes when you speak about others.

The way you still cradle what has broken inside you as though tenderness alone might somehow put it back together.

The way you stand among the ruins and still worry about what might be damaged if you finally walk away.

That tells me everything.

You do not have to name the storm for me to know you have been standing in one.

I see how carefully you protect the things that have already cost you pieces of yourself.

How your heart still remembers what it once hoped for,

and keeps laying flowers at the grave of what it wanted to become.

There is something painfully beautiful about that kind of loyalty—

and something devastating too.

Because sometimes the softest hearts remain longest in places where they have learned to whisper.

And beneath all of it, I hear the exhausted woman—

the one who has spent so long keeping everything standing that she has forgotten what it feels like to rest without listening for something to fall.

The woman who has spent so long keeping everyone else warm that she no longer remembers what it feels like to stand beside a fire built for her.

And I will not tell you to run.

I cannot choose the door for you.

I will not take the life you have lived and reduce it to a sentence spoken from the outside.

Only you know the rooms you have walked through.

Only you know what leaving costs.

Only you know when your heart is ready to stop calling survival a home.

So I will not pull you.

I will not push you.

I will simply remain here—

with my arms open.

Not as a destination you owe me.

Not as another cage painted to look like love.

Just somewhere soft to fall if one day you become tired of standing alone.

When you are ready,

I want you to know there is a place beside me where the rain in your eyes does not have to be hidden.

Where silence is not punishment.

Where your sadness does not make you difficult to love.

Where you can close your eyes without wondering which version of the night is waiting for you.

And if that day never comes,

I will still be grateful that somewhere in this life I was allowed to see you.

Really see you.

The woman beneath all that weather.

The tenderness beneath the bruised places no one can photograph.

The light beneath everything that tried to convince you you were darkness.

But if one day your hand reaches through those walls,

you will not have to search for mine.

It will already be there.

And my arms—

they will not close around you until you choose to step into them.

But they will remain open.

Quietly.

Patiently.

For as long as you need to believe that somewhere in this world,

being held does not have to hurt.