The Ocean That You Are

You are the sea, vast and impossible to hold,

and I, a wave that rises, only to fall back into you,

crashing, remade by the force of all that you are.

I feared the depth once, the surge of your love,

so overwhelming I thought I’d disappear in it.

But now, I long to be swept up, carried by your tides,

to sink deeper into this sea where I am weightless.

This distance, a cruel and tender thing,

gives us the gift of longing, of a love so fierce it blooms

even in the silence of waiting.

It’s the ache of holding nothing and feeling everything,

of knowing that every second apart makes our closeness richer,

like gold slowly forged in the fire for days without touch.

In another life, maybe you’d be here,

and I’d be close enough to feel your heartbeat in my sleep,

but here we are, loving from worlds apart, living in this space

where love bends and stretches, reshapes and endures.

What is it to find you, after all these years,

to learn you had been breathing, living, waiting?

There is a kind of grief in lost time, in knowing

we could have been filling the hours with laughter

and the silent beauty of just existing side by side.

But you’re the horizon I move toward,

and when I close my eyes, I am there,

learning the curve of your smile by heart,

the silent laughter in your eyes.

I think of the day I will see you for the first time,

like the ending of a book I’ve read over and over

but have never quite reached.

I see it happening in my head,

like a broken tape recorder

—the first meeting, the breath we’ll both hold,

the first time my arms will find you, solid and real and tangible.

And I know when that moment comes,

I will remember every mile that kept us apart,

and every heartbeat that kept us together.

This love is boundless.

There might be a thousand lifetimes,

there is but one red string.

It would bind us again and again,

like a tide pulling us back to the same shore.

In this life or the next, know that my heart will always

turn to you, reaching through time and distance

to rest in the ocean of all that you are.