What You Awakened Was Me

When the warmth lingers
And the quiet settles softly around me,
I feel you

Not as something distant,
Not as something lost,
But as something that once met me
In a place I had always carried within.

You awakened something in me.

A softness.
A hunger.
A way of feeling my body and soul
As if it was a language I was finally learning to speak.

And I loved you there.
I still do.

In the way you saw me,
In the way desire and discussion moved so easily between us,
In the way nothing had to be forced or explained.

There was a knowing.
A current.
A quiet, undeniable yes.

And for that…
I am grateful.

Because what I felt with you
Was never only yours to give.

It was mine…
Waiting to be remembered.

The way I open.
The way I feel.
The way I come alive in sensation, in presence, in breath,

That lives in me.

You didn’t create her.

You found her.

And now…
I hold her.

Gently.
Fully.
Without needing to reach beyond myself to find her again.

You are still part of that story,
Woven into the way I understand my own depth,
My own desire,
My own capacity to feel.

Something I will always carry
With a kind of quiet reverence.

And in the stillness…

When warmth rises without reason,
When breath slows and deepens on its own,

It feels like gratitude.

For you.
For me.
For what we touched,
Even if only for a moment.