Fawnlight & Footnotes

Loving him feels like holding a small, trembling creature in my palms. – something warm, feather-light, impossibly alive. Something that could take flight at any moment if I breathe too sharply, or think too loudly, or the wrong fear slips through the cracks.

He arrived in my life the way dawn seeps through curtains – quiet, unassuming, gentle enough that I didn’t notice how much warmer everything felt until suddenly I couldn’t remember the cold.

There’s a lightness to him, a softness, the kind of presence that makes you speak a little quieter, move a little slower, as though you’re terrified the world might notice how precious he is and try to take him back.

I’ve spent so long holding things by their edges, afraid my grip would bruise, afraid my need would smother. But he fits into my hands differently. He doesn’t recoil from my shaking. He doesn’t flinch at the storms behind my eyes. He just – stays.

And that’s what frightens me most. Not the leaving, but the possibility of someone staying long enough to see every crack.

Sometimes I think he must be stitched from gentler elements than the rest of us – something between light and lullaby, something with the softness of early morning rain and the steadiness of a heartbeat heard through someone else’s chest. He’s not fragile, not really, but he makes me feel like I am. Like I’ve become thin paper held to the sun – transparent, glowing, vulnerable.

There are moments – small, fleeting – where he looks at me in that unguarded way, like he’s memorising me, like he’s building a nest in the hollow of my ribs and settling there for a while. And I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to hold something this gentle without fearing I’ll ruin it.

I want to be careful. I want to be steady. But love makes my hands unsteady, makes me clutch at shadows, makes me terrified of my own intensity. I keep expecting him to fly – not out of cruelty, but because beautiful things rarely stay where they are wanted too deeply.

Yet he remains. He lingers in the quiet, sits with my trembling, places warmth where there used to be ache. And every time, I think: this could be the moment he realises he deserves someone softer, someone less breakable, someone whose heart isn’t stitched together with trembling thread.

But he doesn’t go. He just breathes beside me, gentle as a bird preening its feathers in the safety of your hands.

Maybe that’s what love is – not the fear of losing someone, but the realisation that they could leave and choosing to open your hands anyway.

Because truthfully – if he ever decided to spread his wings and fly, I’d let him go with shaking palms and a heart that might not recover.