The Yearning of my Always and Forever: You by Calista Titus

Have a listen as you read along.

I’ve never been a yearner. I’ve never been the girl who collapses at her lover’s feet in the final moments, clawing at the idea of eternity together. I’ve never loved so fiercely that I thought I might live or die for someone else’s heartbeat—at least, not romantically, not in the ways the stories tell it.

And maybe that’s why you terrify me.

Because you don’t feel like a storm, or a fire, or some violent force I need to brace against. You feel safe. Disarmingly safe. Like rest. Like home. Being with you doesn’t feel like discovery, but recognition. I swear I’ve known you longer than the span of this life. When I met you, I wasn’t meeting you—I was remembering you.

I recognized you in pieces. The cadence of your voice. The quiet warmth of your touch. The way your presence bends the air around me until it feels impossible to breathe anywhere else. Even your scent, your taste, the smallest fragments of you felt like something my soul had memorized lifetimes ago. It was too familiar. Too precise. As if my body had been starving, waiting, aching for you—and finally, finally, you came home.

And my whole being screams at me now, urging me to love you harder than before. To hold on tighter. To believe that we don’t just belong together, we return to each other. Over and over.

I never yearned because none of them were you. They were shadows, pale reflections, bodies I tried to love with a heart that had already chosen. And as much as you terrify me, as much as you unmake me, I promise this:

I will find you in this life.
And the next.
And the one after that.

Always.
Forever.