My Eternal Shore, My Heart's Sojourn 🌹

There are silences between us now—long, aching silences. The kind that stretches across days and seasons, across the hollow of my chest where your laughter once echoed. There’s a strange kind of ache when the truth arrives too late—when love, like a flower blooming after winter, opens only to find the sun has already set. I don’t know where this letter will find you, or if it ever will. But some truths are too heavy to carry in the heart alone. And so, I write. I write this letter with a heart far too full to hold silence any longer. For too long, I stood behind the veil. For too long, I mistook my heart’s thunder for passing storms. But now, in your absence, every breath I take resounds with a name I should have whispered with devotion long ago—yours.

I think I always loved you.
But love and doubt have never been on speaking terms.
And while you stood there, heart unguarded, eyes that begged for my truth, I let silence win. I let fear build a wall between us, mistaking it for protection, when all it did was keep my love hidden, like a bird caged behind ribs, fluttering madly, hopelessly.

You see, I didn’t know it was love—not until it was too late. I thought you were just someone whose presence felt like spring. I didn’t know spring was you. I thought longing was a symptom of time, not your absence. I thought I could breathe fine without you. But now, every breath is a struggle through air that no longer smells of you.

Gibran said, “Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you.”
I never feared the space, but the wind would carry you away.

And yet, here we are—two souls standing on distant shores, with a sea of what-ifs roaring between us. I see your silhouette in the distance sometimes—in strangers’ gestures, in poetry, in half-dreams that vanish by morning. I reach out. But you are wind now. And I am the shore that never held you long enough.

I used to believe love would be loud, certain, obvious. But with you, it was quiet—so quiet I mistook it for friendship, for comfort, for the ordinary beauty of companionship. I didn’t see that love had crept in gently, had curled around my heart like ivy. And by the time I recognised its weight, you were already slipping through my fingers like dusk.

“Love is the veil between lover and lover.”
And I wore that veil like armour, not knowing I was blinding myself to what stood right before me. You. The truth. The soft, aching beauty of you.

If I could go back, I wouldn’t hold you tighter. I wouldn’t even ask you to stay.
I would simply see you. Truly, wholly. I would speak the words before they turned to regrets. I would stand there, vulnerable, heart in hand, and say: It’s you. It’s always been you.

But I didn't.

And now, I walk through life with your name blooming silently in my chest, a garden no one else can enter. I smile. I laugh. But in the quiet moments—those late hours when the world forgets to be loud—I ache. I ache with the truth of what I didn’t say, the love I didn’t claim, and the space I helped create between us.

Still, if love is a sea between the shores of our souls, let this letter be my bottle cast into the waves—an echo of what lived and bloomed in me, even as I remained blind to its name.

With all the love I never said,
The one who still yearns at the water’s edge.