A tryst with destiny

I have walked through rooms of borrowed light,

each doorway folded like a secret map,

holding hands with shadows that learned my name

but never learned the shape beneath my skin.

Love has been a weathered coin in my palm

flawed, cheapened, tossed and called unlucky,

promises like paper boats that sank

before the river learned my sorrow’s weight.

I am tired of half-arranged houses: smiles that fit

only when I soften, laughter that leans away

from the corners where my true edges live.

I have offered whole songs and been given echoes.

So I am looking for someone who will keep me

not as a souvenir but as a sunrise—

someone who reads the margins of my silences

and finds the sentences I dared not write.

Take me with my sunburned hopes and my winter-thoughts,

the messy prayers I fold into pockets,

the stubborn sins and small mercies I own

accept the cluttered rooms, the honest faults.

I want the old-fashioned kind: letters pressed to bone,

dawn-lit hands that do not let go,

a quiet covenant carved into ordinary days,

a laughter that stitches wounds into light.

I have spent what feels like forever counting footsteps

on roads that circled back to empty doors;

my patience is a patient smith who waits

to forge a clasp that will not break with years.

If you come, let us wear time like matching rings

let us promise not a heartbeat but a forever,

not the brittle gold of passing fashion

but the metal that tempers in both storm and calm.

Find me soon, as if the world itself leans in

I will bring everything that I am, unruly and bright,

and we will build, with hands that remember how,

a love that outlives any single life.