What Love Leaves Unlocked

There are rooms inside us no one should enter with a key.

Still, some people arrive and mistake the locked door for an invitation to break it open. They call it closeness. They call it devotion. They call it love.

But I have learned to listen for the sound beneath the words.

A cage can be made of flowers. A promise can become a shadow. A hand can hold you so gently that, at first, you do not notice you have stopped moving.

I disappear from places like that. Not suddenly. Like water finding a crack in the stone. Like a bird remembering the sky in the middle of the night.

Because love, to me, has always been something stranger. Something without walls.

It is not the desire to possess the mystery. It is the courage to stand before it and let it remain untamed.

To love someone is not to ask: Will you stay exactly as you are so I can recognize you?

It is to whisper: Go where your soul becomes more visible. I will not turn your becoming into a betrayal.

Perhaps that is why love is powerful. Not because it binds two people together— but because, in its truest form, it releases what fear would try to keep.

I do not want to be held until I become smaller than my own longing.

I want to be met at the edge of the unknown.

And if love is real, it will know the difference between losing me and watching me become impossible to contain.

Love is not the door that closes.

It is what waits on the other side of freedom.

Another year of becoming. Another door left open.