Ink & Silence: For Your Eyes Only
"If I Had Known You Sooner"
I don’t really know where to begin.
Maybe that’s the thing about thoughts left unsaid for too long — they get tangled in the heart.
But let me try anyway.
It would've been good for me to have had someone like you to hang around with.
I think about that a lot. How different everything might've been…
if you had been there for my quiet days, the rainy mornings, the little moments that needed softness. Your kind of presence.
I probably would have learned a lot from someone like you.
Not in the obvious ways, but in the ways that matter —
how you laugh at the world, how your eyes carry a patience I never quite knew.
You would've taught me things I didn’t even know I needed to learn.
Like how to be still. How to be open. How to just… feel.
Sometimes I wonder why I had to be so stubborn and closed-off.
Why I always kept people at arm’s length — even the ones who made me feel safe. Especially you.
I don't know where that comes from.
But it’s there. In me. A quiet defense.
One that kept the world out... and you too.
I like you so, so much that I’m avoiding you.
What a terrible, tender contradiction that is.
To crave your company and yet flee from it.
To look for your name in every room, only to pretend I don’t see you.
It’s not fair, I know.
Merely seeing you, seeing your smile, seeing your effortless, indescribable beauty brings me complete, inexplicable joy —
You light up everything.
And when you smile… I feel something tighten in my chest.
Like I’ve missed something all my life, and suddenly, there it is — in you.
But it also hurts because it will never be more than this.
This unspoken something that lives in silence. A gentle ache with no destination.
I have to protect my battered heart.
Because it’s been cracked open before.
And though you’re not the one who broke it,
you are the one I fear could shatter it completely.
I wish I could come home to you every day.
Not just in the physical sense.
But in the way people come home to warmth, to understanding, to a soft place to rest.
That’s what you feel like. Home.
But I guess some homes are just meant to be dreamed of.
Maybe in another lifetime, I won’t be so scared.
Maybe there, I’ll meet you with open arms instead of trembling hands.
And maybe… just maybe, we’ll get it right.
