That What Guides Us, We Follow

I don't play to impress
I play to remember.
Each string I touch is a thread
in the tapestry of love I've sworn to protect

My fingers move not with ease,
but with reverence-
like a priest blessing the altar,
or a soldier tracing the name
of someone he swore to never forget.

This guitar is not my weapon.
It is my witness.
It has heard the silence between heartbreaks,
and the roar of promises kept.
I am not its master.
I am its servant.
And when I play,
I do not ask love to come.
I remind it that I never left

-

I don't move like the water-
I move like the rock.
Firm.
Still.
Not because I don't feel,
but because I've stood through storms
that didn't stay.

The water came-
soft at first,
then crashing.
It carved pieces of me
without asking if I could bear it,
but never stayed long enough
to know what it shaped.

-

The wind didn't whisper,
it carried her.
The moon didn't shine,
it pulled.

She came not by promise,
but by pattern-
like the tide that knows
where the rock waits.

Not forced,
not begged,
just drawn-
the way a grain of sand
curves the earth
and finds its final place.

Not surrender.
Not silence.
But belonging.

-

She is not the wave that broke me,
nor the storm that passed.
She is the tide that returns-
not to claim,
but to stay.

We do not build altars to each other.
We build mornings.
We build meals.
We build silence that doesn't ache.

She doesn't ask me to move.
She rests beside the rock,
and lets the water speak.

And in her presence,
I am not worn down-
I am worn true.
Smoothed by time,
not erased.
Loved, not owned.
Still,
but no longer alone.