Antes de perderte (While You're Still Here)

I think the cruelest part was never loving you.

It was realizing that love begins with loss already stitched into it.

Some people stay for a lifetime.

Others change us forever without ever truly belonging to us.

Most of us never know which story we're living until it has already begun to change.

Maybe that's why I have always carried this quiet grief.

Not because I believed you would leave,

but because nothing beautiful ever promises to stay the same.

There is something heartbreaking about allowing another person to become part of your inner world. Little by little, they begin to live in places you didn't know existed.

Your first thought.

Your safest laugh.

The person you instinctively reach for when something beautiful happens.

Or when everything falls apart.

And then one day,

without anyone doing anything wrong,

life keeps moving.

That has always been the part that frightened me.

Not endings.

Transformation.

The slow realization that the person who once occupied a certain place inside you

will someday inhabit it differently.

Not because the love disappears.

Because life changes the shape of everything it touches.

I've never wanted to hold you still.

Love has never felt like possession to me.

If anything,

it has always felt like standing beside something beautiful

while knowing it has its own direction,

its own seasons,

its own sky to disappear into.

Still,

I have caught myself mourning versions of us that were never gone.

Conversations before they ended.

Laughter before it faded.

Moments before they became memories.

As if my heart has always been trying to soften tomorrow

by grieving it a little today.

Maybe that's why you became so important.

Not because you rescued me.

Not because you completed me.

Because somewhere along the way,

you reminded me that I was still capable of feeling life with my whole heart.

You became proof that I could still be surprised by joy.

Still be undone by tenderness.

Still find parts of myself in another person's presence.

And perhaps that is all any of us ever really become to each other.

Not forever.

Not ownership.

Not certainty.

Just places we are fortunate enough to call home

for however long the door remains open.

Maybe loving someone has never been about believing they'll stay.

Maybe it has always been about knowing they won't,

and loving them with your whole heart anyway.