There is a moment, as still as a shadow on an evening, when love stops being a thing that you fall into and becomes a thing that you stand upon. The early days had been a carnival of discovery, the way their voice cracks on one word, the secret maps of their freckles. Now you have the topography memorized. Discovery has become ritual. But ritual is not routine; it is the sacred repetition that makes wine a sacrament. You no longer marvel at their hands, you know them. And in that knowledge, a greater intimacy than surprise takes hold.
You start to reveal the layers, not only of them, but of you. Love, in its infancy, was a mirror reflecting only the good bits of you. Now, it reflects the cracks, the scuffs, the areas where life has left its mark. And yet, they don't turn away. They map those lines like returning to a place where you've constructed together.
It’s not just candlelight and poetry; it’s massaging your sore neck after work, removing blackheads from my nose in the harsh bathroom light, the kind of care so unglamorous it feels more like truth than romance.
And then those fights, no longer events with edges, no beginning, no end. They are like ink spilled on thirsty paper, seeping slow and soundless, dissolving into the fibres until even memory forgets their shape. They are not actions but shadows, a shift in the air between us, unnoticed until the weight has already settled. I cannot say when the change came, only that it did, quiet as breath, inevitable as dusk.
You used to fear the silence, mistaking it for distance. Now, you understand its dialect. There is a whole vocabulary in the way they sigh into their coffee, in the way you both can sit in a car for an hour, saying nothing, and yet arrive lighter than when you left. Silence is no longer an absence but a presence, a shared breath between two people who no longer need to fill the air to prove they are alive together.
And yet, the ghost of the beginning lingers. It flickers in the corner of an old joke; in the way they still hum that same off-key song in the shower. You catch it sometimes, not as nostalgia, but as proof. Proof that the child is still there, buried under layers of bills and burnt dinners and the quiet understanding that love is not a firework but a hearth. You don’t mourn the spark; you tend the embers. Because maturity is not the death of play, it’s the realization that play never left. It just learned to exist in the space between responsibility, in the stolen laughter, the late-night light movie time when one snores and other laughs, in the way you still, after all this time, reach for their hand when crossing the street.
And then, one day, you realize love is not a destination, but a return, a quiet circling back to the same moment, over and over, like that page in your favourite book, folded at the corner, where you always wanted to come back to.
The years stretch, but the small things remain; the way they pinch you with that pseudo anger, the way their hand finds yours without thinking, the way you know each other’s silences better than anyone else’s words. The fights come and go like summer storms, loud but brief, leaving the air clearer in their wake. The love isn’t less, it’s deeper, woven into the ordinary, into the laundry folded just right, the coffee made without asking, the way you still catch each other’s eye across a crowded room and know, without speaking, you’re my person.
And at the end of it all, when the sun dips low and the house is quiet, when the memories stretch behind you like shadows and the future hums softly ahead, you turn to them, really look at them, and see the years etched into their smile, the history in their touch, the life you’ve built in the spaces between the breaths.
And at that moment, we realise that
we’re infinity!
Comments
Post a Comment