I wake before the sun—
the world still holding its breath,
caught in that fragile hush
before becoming.
Your arm rests over me
like a question half-dreamed—
not out of longing,
but reverence.
You are warm.
Anchored.
Still—
as if my stillness is sacred
and you've learned not to break it.
I remain folded
in the hush,
not from shyness,
but memory.
I have known love
as something barbed—
a coin tossed for silence,
a shrinking to fit
someone else's wanting.
But you...
you are not shaped
from that kind of wound.
When I stir,
your touch does not seek—
it settles.
Like dusk finding branches.
Like tide meeting stone.
Certain.
Quiet.
And when your breath brushes
the hollow of my shoulder,
what stirs is not fear,
but the echo of its absence.
You linger there,
as though deciphering
the quiet woven
into my skin—
the syllables I never spoke aloud.
Something loosens.
A thread pulled.
A window unlatched.
I turn to you,
uncertain but willing—
not in hunger,
but in hope.
And you meet me
with stillness.
With patience.
With eyes that speak
only in invitation.
As if love, with you,
is a place one arrives slowly—
with bare feet
and open palms.
I let you in—
not like wildfire,
but like first light
spilling through a seam
in the dark.
You do not rush.
You gather.
You listen with your hands.
Each gesture
a verse composed
in the hush between heartbeats.
And when I rise
to meet the warmth
you offer—
it is not to yield,
but to return
to something I forgot
was mine to keep.
And when the moment
softens open—
when what we carry
pours out like rain returning
to its sky—
there is no breaking.
Only becoming.
A dissolving
into something vaster
than name.
You keep holding me
as if I am still
something holy.
And I press a truth
into the quiet at your chest:
You make it easy to stay.
Because you are
my sunrise.
My softness.
My forever.
And this—
this is the version
where I am not afraid
to be seen.
Where I do not vanish
to be loved.
Where love waits,
light in hand,
and everything
begins
again.
YOU ARE READING
In Every Version of Every World
PoetryA soft anthology of alternate endings and love that lingers. Quiet poems, what-if reflections, and tender scenes from other lives - where love comes back, or maybe never left at all. For the ones who still wonder what could've been.
