Borrowed Innocence

I could tell this story from who I am now.

From the woman who knows how silence can bruise. From the one who learned that love doesn’t always arrive with permission. From the version of me that understands how easy it is to confuse longing with safety.

But that would be dishonest because this story didn’t begin in strength. It began in openness.

It belongs to the girl who still believed connection was something you leaned into, not something you armored against. She was innocent, yes — but already cracked in the quiet places. Already wanting a love that felt chosen, not convenient.

Through her eyes, you were softer. She remembers your mouth before your absence.Your hands before your distance.Your voice saying you loved her before it learned how to go cold.Your fire before the smoke it left behind.

She met you before fear rewrote you.

Memory edits. It protects what once felt sacred.

When I look back, I don’t begin with the nights I unraveled — I begin with the way you looked at me when you wanted me. The pause in your breathing when I entered a room. The way your attention felt physical, like fingers before touch. The way loving me once felt instinctive to you, before timing and temptation complicated everything.

To tell us, I don’t use my present eyes. I borrow hers.

There are more than twenty journals that hold our bodies in ink — years of heat and hesitation, of cities and separations, of promises whispered and abandoned and whispered again. Each page is a version of me asking why we kept choosing the long way around each other instead of staying.

Our love has never been gentle.

It’s been a journey —crooked, magnetic, dangerous in its beauty. We were always off course and never without direction. Always moving toward something we couldn’t name. There was no definition. No timeline. No guarantees. Just gravity. Just that pull that made distance feel temporary even when it lasted years.

I loved you even when loving you asked too much of me.

I loved the man beneath your habits.

The soul beneath your hunger.

The truth beneath your disappearances.

Others counted your sins. Sometimes you did too.

But I saw past them.

I saw the boy still awake inside the man. The tenderness you hid under distance. The loyalty buried beneath fear. The way you wanted to be good, even when you didn’t know how to stay.

I didn’t love you because you were safe.

I loved you because you were familiar in a way time can’t teach.

So these pages aren’t written by the woman I became without you; they are written by the woman who first undressed her guard for you.

The one who met you before restraint replaced instinct.

Before desire learned to apologize.

Before love learned how to survive disappointment.

This is her story.

And through her, you are still dangerous, still beautiful, still unfinished;

And I am still, somehow, walking toward you across years that pretend they are distance, certain there is a destination waiting where time and circumstance stop arguing with our love and let us meet without fear, regret, or pain.