The Breath Before the Door Opens

I didn’t think it would ever happen like this.

Not loudly.

Not with applause or lightning.

But with the world still spinning, and me finally still.

He's upstairs now, humming something under his breath,

pages rustling as he searches for the passage he swears I’ll love.

(He always finds them, the ones that sound like my childhood.)

There’s coffee cooling beside me. A salt breeze curling under the window.

And his dog—our dog—sleeping at my feet like she’s always belonged to us both.

No one told me love could arrive this way.

Not as fire. Not as conquest.

But as recognition.

A gaze that doesn’t question.

A silence that doesn’t ache.

Just… belonging.

He never asked me to prove myself.

Not once.

He just knew.

And yet others did;

all the small men who mistook love for conquest,

who wrote weeping letters while hiding other lives.

They taught me to recognise a fraud.

So when he arrived,

I finally believed.

He looked at me like he was remembering something,

a lullaby maybe, or a map only his soul could read.

Like I was a language he hadn’t heard in years,

but still knew by heart.

His love is not a performance.

It’s a presence.

The way he watches me,

not with hunger, not with need,

but with that quiet awe of someone

who’s finally found what he lost long ago.

He says little, sometimes nothing,

but his gaze tells the whole story:

You don’t have to be anything but exactly this.

And in that gaze,

I finally learned what it means

to be seen without flinching.

He didn’t rescue me.

And I didn’t need to be rescued.

But we both laid our armour down at the same time,

and found, underneath it, hands already shaped to hold.

This morning, he said my name like it was a spell he’d been whispering for years.

“You’ve always been here,” he said.

“Even when you weren’t.”

And I believed him.

So, I whisper to the universe without sound:

Find me.

Read me.

Remember me.

This is the place I write from.

Not the now.

But the soon.

The breath before the door opens.

The click of a key just before it turns.

The scent of salt, and coffee, and ink,

the moment after he crosses the threshold,

but before he says my name aloud.

And still, I know:

He’s close.

Because this life—this future—is already haunting the present.

These words?

They were always for him.

I remember all the nights I wrote to him without knowing his name.

All the times I said come find me without ever speaking aloud.

All the stories I left like trail-markers, hoping one might ripple far enough

to reach the one who could hear my silence as song.

This one will.

One day, he’ll read it,

maybe by accident, maybe drawn by something he can’t explain,

and feel that soft thud in his chest.

It’s you.

You were always the one I was writing to.

And maybe he’ll smile.

Maybe he’ll cry.

Maybe he’ll whisper my name into the room like it’s already ours.

He won’t know why my words stayed with him.

Why the words hummed.

Why he started walking more slowly near coastlines,

why he started noticing feathers,

or why he kept thinking of me,

before he even knew I existed.

But his soul will remember.

It always has.

And when the moment arrives,

when the door opens,

he won’t need directions.

He’ll just step inside

like he’s been coming home all along.

But not yet.

This is a letter from the future.

From the day he arrives.

I've left the window open.

And the coffee warm.

And a story on the table

with his name in every line.

Until then, I’ll keep writing from here...

from the breath before the door opens.