I'm Still Learning Not To Run

They always say you’ll just know. That when it’s right—when it’s real— it won’t be confusing, it won’t be complicated, and you won’t have to beg it to stay. As if the truth would arrive fully dressed, radiant and unmistakable, standing at the door of your life, saying, “Here I am — the ease you’ve been waiting for.”

But I’ve lived long enough inside my own head to know that clarity doesn’t always come with light.

Sometimes it comes in murmurs. In barely-there warmth. In the quiet way a presence lingers, without asking for applause.

For so long, I assumed love had to be complicated. I mistook hunger for desire. Thought chasing meant it must be worth it. Thought silence meant mystery, and hot-and-cold meant passion.

I was fluent in anxiety — in decoding ellipses, in analyzing the absence of things. But I’ve never lacked love. Not really.

There has always been a gentle current of it — in the way my friends hold space for me, in the steady, unspoken loyalty of family, in how we laugh around the kitchen counter long after dinner has gone cold… That kind of love raised me.

It kept me from falling through the cracks I sometimes stood too close to.

But romantic love? The kind that doesn’t make your body tighten in anticipation of the next disappointment? The kind that hasn’t arrived yet, packing its exit?

I didn’t think it was real. Not for me, at least.

I’ve met people who only saw me in fragments. Who looked at me like a puzzle and grew tired when the pieces didn’t immediately fit. I’ve had conversations that only existed under the flicker of club lights, affections that evaporated by morning.

And always, I knew. Even when I tried to believe otherwise. Even when I clung to the what-if instead of the what-is.

Then came something different. Or maybe not different — maybe just quieter.

Unthreatening.

A rhythm I didn’t have to earn. A conversation that kept unfolding.

Someone—or something— stayed, without needing to be convinced.

I don’t want to say “love,” because naming it might be the same as scaring it off.

But I will say this:

It feels like safety. Like softness. Like the edge has been taken off the world, just slightly. Still I hesitate. I doubt.

The past has trained me well.

There are still nights when I lie in bed and catalog the signs. When I remember how easily things fall apart. How affection, too, can be a vanishing act.

And I wonder:

How long until this folds into the same shape? How long until I am reminded that I am always a little too much, or not quite enough?

But there’s a voice— small, defiant — that wants to believe otherwise.

That whispers: You don’t have to bleed to deserve softness.

That maybe this time, I can let the present be enough.

I don’t have to squint into the future trying to find the warning signs. I don’t have to treat peace like it’s a trick.

Maybe this time, I can just be here. To trust this — even for a while— is a kind of rebellion. It is choosing not to armor up. It is letting the heart unclench. It is allowing the warmth without measuring how long it will stay. I want to stay. In the softness. In the now. In the not-yet-defined, but deeply felt.

And maybe that’s what makes this different.

Not the certainty.

But that fact that I’m still here— and not running.