Half a moment

Half a second. Half a minute. A minute a hour a day a week a month…. Time is patient. Time is cruel time is a mistress of happiness that I can’t contend with  It steals you from me one second at a time, yet somehow gives you back just enough to remind me what home feels like. You don’t understand what you do to me. You think your greatest gift is your love, or your patience, or the way you desire me so completely that I forget every person who came before you. But it isn’t. It’s the silence. Not the silence in the room, but the silence in my mind. For years my head has been relentless. It has whispered that I wasn’t enough. That I was too much. Too broken. Too ugly. Too difficult to love. It has tried to convince me that happiness was something made for everyone else. Then you touch me. Half a second is enough. Your hand finding mine. Your head resting on my shoulder. Your eyes meeting mine across a room. The noise stops. Not forever. Not completely. But long enough for me to remember who I am beneath it all. You have no idea that I would happily spend my day cleaning your home while you slept peacefully on the sofa. Not because I have to. Not because I’d expect anything in return. But because after everything life has demanded of you, after every burden you’ve carried that should never have been yours, I want to carry some of the weight instead. You deserve quiet mornings. You deserve to wake without fear. You deserve to be looked after for once instead of always being the one surviving. If I could take every hard day you’ve ever lived and replace it with gentle ones, I would do it without a second thought. People talk about love as though it’s butterflies and fireworks. Mine is simpler. It’s wanting your washing done before you wake.

It’s wanting your favourite drink waiting for you.

It’s wanting your shoulders to relax because, for once, someone else has taken over. You have changed me in every way a person can change another. You have made me softer where life made me hard. Braver where fear had rooted itself. You brought back the parts of me I thought had died years ago. The words. The creativity. The hope. The version of me that believed there could be something beyond merely surviving. I thought I had lost myself. Instead, I was just waiting for you. You didn’t complete me.

You reminded me that I was always capable of being whole you simply loved me enough to help me find the pieces again.