Love

I keep my distance like a quiet vow,

not out of absence, but intention.

Love, for me, is not always reaching—

sometimes it is restraint.

I have learned the gravity of closeness,

how it pulls, how it burns,

how even the gentlest orbit

can end in collision.

So I stand here,

a horizon you can almost touch,

close enough to feel the warmth,

far enough not to be consumed.

I love you in the spaces between things—

in unsent messages,

in pauses that say more than words,

in the discipline of turning away.

There is a kind of devotion

that does not ask to be held,

that survives on glimpses,

on the soft ache of “almost.”

And though my hands remain empty,

my heart is not

it is carefully kept,

beating for you

from a distance it chose.