I keep telling myself that I can wait, even though you never asked me to stay here, and you never promised that something would be waiting for me at the end of it.
This waiting is a choice I continue to make because, for now, I am still willing.
Somewhere inside me lives the hope that time may lead you toward me—that one day, you may finally see everything I have been offering and find yourself ready to receive it.
But how long can my heart remain here without knowing whether you are still coming—or whether you ever intended to come at all?
Until the silence becomes familiar?
Until every delayed answer stops surprising me?
Until I learn to call the smallest moments enough because asking for more begins to feel like asking for too much?
Sometimes, I catch myself measuring my days by your presence.
A message.
A reaction.
A few words from you.
And when none of them comes, I quietly carry the absence as though it were simply another part of loving you.
But what happens when waiting becomes the only thing we share?
Do I stay until hope loses its voice?
Until I no longer remember what it felt like to be wanted without first having to reach?
Until there is nothing left of me except the part that still knows how to love you?
That is what frightens me. The fear goes beyond never being chosen.
I am afraid I may spend so much of myself waiting that I forget I was once a person beyond this longing—a person with a life that did not rise and fall according to whether you remembered to come closer.
Because the truth is, there is no guarantee.
No promise that after all this patience, you will find your way to me. No certainty that loving you gently will someday make you ready to love me back.
Time may soften something between us.
Or it may slowly take everything from me while leaving you untouched.
Still, I wait.
I know love does not earn an answer simply by enduring.
I know patience cannot turn uncertainty into a promise.
Yet leaving while my heart still wants to stay would feel like abandoning something honest within me.
Perhaps one day, you will finally be ready.
That is the hope I keep returning to.
Perhaps you will look for me and find that I am still here—with the same tenderness, the same open hands, and a heart that somehow survived every unanswered moment.
Or perhaps you will return to the place where I waited and find only traces of who I used to be—
someone who kept believing you were on your way,
someone who loved you for as long as he could,
someone who eventually had to leave before waiting took everything.
I do not know which ending belongs to us.
I only know that today, I am still willing to hope.
Today, I am still willing to wait.
But I cannot promise that I will stay until there is nothing left.
Because even if you never come closer, even if you never accept the love I keep placing between us, I hope I will still have enough of myself left to carry the truth: I waited for you because I loved you—
even without a promise
that you would come back.