Back then, I still flinched at my own reflection.
Not from vanity—
but because the mirror told the truth too clearly:
that I was surviving,
not living.
That the world had taught me to shrink
just enough to fit inside the silence.

I met you before you knew how to raise your fist.
You still spoke like you were asking permission—
your voice a tremble in a room full of roars.
You smelled like burnt sage and stolen time.
You were always late, always dreaming,
always writing manifestos in the margins of your textbooks
instead of listening to the teacher.

I was scared of the word “love” back then.
It sounded too much like surrender.
But you never asked me to surrender.
You asked me to feel.
You sat beside me at the rally when I didn’t know the chant.
You didn’t correct me—
you chanted softer, until I caught the rhythm.
That’s how I learned love isn’t thunder.
It’s the echo that teaches you how to speak back to the sky.

We weren’t a couple.
We were possibility.
Two bruised strangers drawn to the warmth in each other’s ache.
We met in the library basement
where your zine was hidden between old encyclopedias
like a secret gospel.
You passed it to me
with ink-stained fingers and eyes like rebellion,
and I read it in one sitting—
then read it again,
with my heart cracked open like a fault line.

You told me your mother stopped saying “I love you”
after the third eviction.
I told you mine only said it when I aced a test.
We found each other in that hunger—
the ache for a love that didn’t measure us.

We didn’t kiss.
Not then.
That would’ve been too easy, too cinematic.
Instead, we built something slower—
a friendship made of quiet revolutions,
shared playlists,
coffee too late at night,
and shoulders that always made space.

You were the first person who asked me
what I wanted to destroy.
And when I whispered “everything,”
you didn’t blink.
You just nodded and said,
“Then let’s learn how to build something better.”

That’s when I knew.
Even if it took five more years,
Even if we had to burn
through fear, doubt,
and the systems that caged us—
you would be there
at the end of it all.

With ink on your hands,
a tear in your shirt,
and a future in your eyes
that looked
just like freedom.