Even the Credits

I don't just want photos with you.

I want a whole life with you.

I want laughs, inside jokes, and ordinary days,

adventure and sad days too.

I want us,

and all the spaces in between,

the whole movie beyond the final credits.

I want the kind of life that doesn’t feel staged, just lived,

where I don’t have to survive, but finally get to thrive.

I want the ordinary and everything inside it

the quiet mornings, the half-finished sentences,

the way time feels when it isn’t being watched.

The small things that don’t try to become memories

but somehow still do.

And I know I'm writing another book,

one that's already well underway.

The ink is dry on half the pages,

yet something feels misplaced.

I've spent years inside its chapters,

learning every scene by heart.

But somewhere along the story,

the person I am and the role I played drifted apart.

Somewhere in those chapters my name was left unspoken,

a margin line, half-faded, half-forgotten.

Still, I kept turning pages I could no longer enter,

staying in a story already written in past tense.

And now, between the chapters,

between what was and what could be,

there's a quiet I keep returning to

not the one I learned to survive in.

And still, I want it all with you.

The photos, the laughter, the ordinary days.

The chaos and the calm.

The soft and the loud of it.

I want a whole life with you,

the whole movie, even the credits we would sit through together.