Where Tenderness Lives

There are some bonds that do not arrive with any sort of noise, yet grow into something you learn to recognise as essential. Ours began quietly, but over time it settled in the kind of place where words rarely reach. A space where quiet pain met quiet care, and from which I learned that tenderness can be so full it borders on unbearable.

​

What looks like small, ordinary moments from the outside began to take on a kind of vulnerability from within. In them, I found a home...not the visible, brick-and-mortar kind, but a rare, unshakable shelter that lives in gestures, glances, pauses.

​

This feeling is not easily defined. It has edges, yes, but it is also bare, unadorned. It reminds me of snow that simply falls and covers without needing permission. There’s something in it that belongs to both of us and neither of us at the same time, a spark that finds ways to catch again and again, undeterred by whatever tries to smother it.

​

It is not fragile. It drifts and wanders, resists being neatly contained. At times it’s still, so light it could be overlooked, and at others it rushes forward, fierce and unstoppable. But always, in some way, it remains.