To be loved by me is to live in my words

The way I love has always gone against the idea that nothing lasts forever. The way I write is a rebellion—it refuses to let the people I love be forgotten, or worse, die.

For as long as I know how to write, you will know how I love. This has always been my quiet way of refusing oblivion, because everything else in this life can be stolen or taken back, but the words I give can never be undone. They are completely, beautifully irretrievable.

I cannot promise that the people I love will always remain in my life. People leave, seasons change, and hands slip away. But I can promise that they will remain in my words. As long as I can breathe life into a blank page, the love they left behind will always have somewhere to live.

I have never been good at proving love through grand gestures. I cannot promise that I will always say the perfect words in the heat of a moment or that I will never clumsily forget a date worth celebrating. But I have always known how to write. When the noise of the world is too loud, this is how I show you who you are to me. Somehow, the page has become the only way I know how to love people back.

Because writing has always been the closest thing I know to forever.

I don’t just write my story. I carry the stories of the people who have loved me, the people I have loved, and even those who stayed only long enough to change the way my heart speaks.

Some people taught me how to write gently, leaving soft spaces between sentences like slow Sunday mornings where nothing hurts. Others taught me what heartbreak looked like once it finally found its way onto the page. Every sentence felt heavy, like an apology that arrived too late. Some arrived as blinding joy, turning my words into a celebration, while others left behind grief that taught me how to articulate the spaces where someone used to be. And then there are the few who remained as questions I never quite found the courage to answer. 

Looking back, I realize that every person who has touched my life has changed the language I write in. They became part of my vocabulary without ever meaning to. Some left me with words I return to often, while others became the silence I still find myself trying to translate.

Maybe that is what writing has always been for me—a place where the people I love are allowed to stay a little longer.

And I hope they never have to look at the empty spaces and wonder whether I loved them enough. If they ever do, I hope they look a little closer and find the answer tucked safely somewhere between the lines.

After all, the only way I know how to honor a life that has been loved is to write it—not exactly as it happened, but as it made me feel.