The Day Our
Universe Began
Two souls pulled together by the same force
that binds galaxies
“Somewhere between the turning of the earth and the light of ten billion stars, two people found each other.”
“I didn't fall in love with you by accident, I chose you the way you choose something you know in your bones is real, and out of everyone I ever met you were the one who made every wall I ever built just quietly fall away.”
“There was a call where I suddenly heard your real voice through all the static, and I just thought, wait, Anci, this is you, oh my god I found you, and the love I felt in that second was more real than anything I've ever known.”
“On the night we became us, a nebula nine thousand light-years away was giving birth to new stars, and I didn't know that then, but I think the universe was making something new that night, the same way I felt made new when I found you.”
“You kept the rose from Shanghai, carried it across a border, built a whole box of memories from a single month together, and nobody's ever done that for me, ever, and I keep coming back to that because it tells me everything about how you love, quietly, completely, with your whole heart.”
Anci,
I remember it being two in the morning, eighteen hours before your flight, and I was sitting there knowing something I couldn’t un-know, and it wasn’t even a question anymore because my whole body had already decided and my brain was just catching up, and that was July 20th, that was the night everything changed.
I had filters, I had standards, I had this whole list of what I thought I needed, and you just walked through all of them like they weren’t even there, not because you were trying to impress me, but because you were just you, and that was enough, that was everything.
It’s been three months now and I won’t lie to you, the distance has haunted me like a ghost, it shows up at night when I’m tired and whispers things that sound almost reasonable, and it changes its story every time, but then I hear your voice on a call, your real voice through all the compression and the lag, and every single argument just dissolves, because none of it was ever real, you are real, only you.
These three months we’ve gotten to know each other deeper than I thought was possible through a screen, we’ve had the ugly conversations, the exhausted ones where the connection is bad and we’re talking past each other, we’ve had nights where everything felt like it was falling apart, and we held on anyway, both of us, every time.
You saw me at my lowest, the hostel floors, the dry oatmeal, the days where I had absolutely nothing, and you didn’t flinch, you told me to take breaks, you worried when I got caught in the rain, you kept a rose from Shanghai and carried it across a border and built a whole box of memories from one month together, and that tells me more about how you love than any words ever could.
I love you more than every star in this sky, every day I wake up and work and push and build and I route every single decision through one question, does this get me closer to being with Anci, that’s the whole compass, that’s the whole point of everything I do.
You are my person, not because the distance is easy but because even when it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done I still choose you, I have always chosen you, and I will keep choosing you until there’s no distance left to close.
She didn’t change who I am, she made me want to become the version of myself I always knew I could be, and there’s something so tender about that, about someone who doesn’t try to shape you but just makes you feel safe enough to shape yourself.
Before her I didn’t think someone could know all of me, the ambition and the mess and the stubbornness and the dreams that sound insane when you say them out loud, and still look at me the way she does, with this warmth in her eyes like none of it scares her, like she sees all of it and wants to stay.
And I think that’s the thing, she doesn’t love a version of me, she loves the whole thing, and I have never in my life had that before, and I am never letting it go.
“Imagine midnight, empty streets, the windows down, you next to me with your hand on mine, music filling the whole car, and neither of us saying anything because we don't need to, because that's where we're going Anci, and every single day I'm getting us closer.”
Anci, I love you.
Until I can hold you again, and never let go.