Heartbeats

There is a place between heartbeats

where your name lives—

soft as breath on winter glass,

fragile, but impossible to erase.

I found you there

before I knew I was searching,

in the way light leans

toward morning,

certain without reason.

You are not thunder—

you are the hush after,

the earth drinking rain,

the slow bloom no one sees

until it has already become

everything.

Loving you feels like

learning a language

my soul always knew,

but my lips were afraid to speak.

Stay—

not as a promise carved in stone,

but as the tide returns to shore,

again, and again,

because it cannot help itself.

If time forgets us,

if days scatter like dust in the wind,

I will still carry you

in the quiet between heartbeats—

where love does not need proof,

only presence.