You are the shore I keep reaching for, the quiet voice in a world that never stops screaming. With you, the noise fades into something I can finally bear. You look at my scars without asking where they came from and for the first time, I do not feel the urge to run.
I am the one who guards the door even while standing inside, a mind that turns a single quiet glance into a sign of betrayal. When my fear takes hold, I split our world into light and utter darkness. I lash out before I can be left behind, dropping heavy, cutting words like iron weights, demanding impossible proof that you will not vanish into the night, making myself unbearable to hold because I am terrified of being dropped.
And you. Your mind is a sudden, unpredictable fire, a hundred thoughts moving at once, losing track of the small promises while chasing a spark only you can hear. When the world grows too loud, your chest tightens and your eyes go cold. You retreat into a sudden, impenetrable distance, locking your jaw and shutting the blinds just when my terror needs you most, overwhelmed by the noise in your own head, pulling away because staying present feels like suffocating.
When my storm meets your overload, we become extremely difficult to take. We are exhausting, heavy, and hard to handle, even for each other. We ignite with the exact same dark, destructive intensity that used to burn older lives to the ground, choosing the chaos over fragile silence, watching sorries fall like rain onto the floorboards, convinced, for a terrifying hour, that we are too broken to survive each other.
Yet in your eyes, I see a home I never thought I deserved. You are the anchor that holds me when the storm inside my head takes over.
The floorboards remember every step we took in rage, yet they hold our weight all the same when the room goes quiet. You look at my jagged edges without horror and I hold you in the dark until the racing thoughts in your mind finally slow down.
We do not have a quiet, effortless peace that sits unchanged in the sun; ours is a shelter built directly in the path of the wind.
It needs a constant repair to build a fragile home into a real home, picking up the pieces without keeping score, smoothing over the cracks and choosing, every single day, to stay and rebuild together.
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