Can you hold the compass while I keep the light?

I used to think love was supposed to disturb me. That the shaking hands meant something. That losing sleep meant I had found something worth staying awake for. That chemistry was the body recognizing its fate before the mind could catch up.

I am less impressed by fire now.

These days, I notice who remembers that I like my mornings quiet. Who leaves my pills by my bedside because I sometimes forget to take them but does not announce that they noticed. Who asks before making the reservation. Who sees me disappear into myself for an hour and does not follow me there with a flashlight demanding to know what happened.

I come back.

That is the part I wish people understood.

My silence is not a door closing. It is a room I go into to put everything back where it belongs. I need a little time with my own thoughts before I can hand them to somebody else without cutting either of us on the edges.

I used to love people who took that personally.

My quiet became proof that I was incapable of respect or integrity. My questions became criticism. Their care arrived already assembled and I was expected to be grateful for a life I had not helped choose.

So I learned to make myself easy to manage. Then resented being managed.

There are old versions of me still living like this. One of them sits very straight at the dinner table and says anything is fine when nothing is. Another one goes silent and waits to see whether love is clever enough to find her.

I am trying to retire them gently. I tell her now: use your words.

She rolls her eyes. We are working on it.

Because I no longer want a love that proves itself by correctly guessing every hidden thing inside me. I want the kind where I can say, I am overwhelmed. Give me an hour. I’ll come back to you, and no tragedy is invented in the meantime.

Maybe this sounds terribly unromantic.

But I have started to find competence beautiful.

A person arriving when they said they would. A problem becoming smaller because there are suddenly two minds looking at it. Someone who can carry their own life well enough that I do not have to hold mine and theirs at the same time. Someone whose care is deliberate and practical, who notices the thing I overlooked and quietly makes the day easier, but still asks before deciding what belongs to both of us.

Someone who does not confuse leadership with deciding for me, and nor I him.

Someone who can say, what do you think? and genuinely wait for the answer. Someone steady enough that I can step back to think without fearing their whole world will collapse because I needed a little space.

I still yearn for warmth. I still want the stupid laughter, the hand at the small of my back, the look across a crowded room that makes the rest of it briefly disappear. I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking her to love her.

I just no longer want to spend the following morning deciphering what any of it meant. And I think I know how I would love him too.

I would notice the things he stopped noticing about himself.

The way he rubs the bridge of his nose when he is tired. The meal he forgets to eat because he is still working. The shirt he reaches for when he wants to feel like himself again. I would learn the rhythm of his responsibilities well enough to know when to help and when not to interfere.

I would not make his competence another place he has to perform.

If the whole world knows him as capable, I would want home to be the place where he is allowed to be uncertain. Where he can put the phone face down, leave something unfinished, admit that he does not know what to do next, and not become smaller in my eyes for it.

I would not need to be the center of his life to know I mattered inside it.

I would want to build beside him. To remember what he forgets. To ask for his opinion before deciding something that belongs to both of us. To make the ordinary parts of life feel cared for enough that neither of us has to carry the whole structure alone.

I think that is how I love when I am healthy. Not by orbiting someone but by standing next to them.

This is what getting older has changed in me. Whether I can read beside you without filling the silence. Whether I can be tired without becoming less lovable. Whether I can close a door for an hour and trust that when I open it, you will not have mistaken my solitude for abandonment.

I do not need someone to complete my life.
I have spent too long learning how to carry one.

I think I want someone who can place their life beside mine without either of us having to become smaller to make room.

Someone who gives me the safety to put my armor down.

Someone for whom I can become a place where armor is unnecessary too.

Maybe that is how I will know.

Not because my heart is racing.

Because neither of us is performing strength for the other.

We are simply strong enough to be soft there.