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Sometimes I wake up before you. Not often. Sleep and I have never really gotten along, but when it happens, I just lie there for a while and watch you. It feels strange admitting that.
After all these years, after all the apartments we've moved through, all the boxes we've packed and unpacked, all the late-night meals and forgotten bills and photographs shoved into drawers because we always said we'd organize them later, I should be used to this by now. I should know you're real. But there's still a part of me that isn't completely convinced.
Maybe it's because I've spent most of my life losing people. Maybe it's because when you grow up surrounded by ghosts, cults, haunted buildings, and secrets that should've never existed in the first place, you start expecting happiness to leave eventually.
Happiness always felt like something meant for other people. For Larry when he'd laugh so hard he couldn't breathe. For Todd whenever he finally figured out something nobody else could understand. For Ashley when she'd act fearless even when she wasn't. Never for me.
And yet here you are. Curled up beside me with your hair spread across the pillow.
You left your glass of water on the nightstand again. There's a faint ring on the wood that you've promised to clean at least a dozen times. You always forget. I could wipe it away myself, but honestly, I don't think I want to. It's proof you were here. A tiny piece of evidence that you exist outside of my imagination.
People always talk about love like it's some huge dramatic thing, kisses in the rain or grand confessions, like in fanfiction.
Maybe that's love for some people, i don't know.
For me, it's this. It's the water stain on the nightstand. It's waking up in the middle of the night because you've stolen most of the blanket again. It's your freezing feet finding my legs every single time without fail. It's Gizmo sleeping by the window, twitching his ears while he dreams about whatever cats dream about. It's coming home and knowing you're there.
Sometimes I think about the kid I used to be back at Addison Apartments. The one who spent every day trying to make sense of a world that never seemed to make sense back. The kid hiding behind a prosthetic face, clinging to a few good friends and a mountain of questions nobody could answer.
If he saw us now, I think he'd call me a liar. He'd probably laugh and tell me that things like this only happen in movies. That people like us don't get happy endings. Some days I still remember everything. The things we saw and the things we survived.
But then I look at you sleeping beside me with your cheek pressed into the pillow and your mouth slightly open, completely unaware of anything except whatever dream you're having, and somehow everything feels lighter. You're a strange kind of salvation.
You looked at all the broken pieces and decided they weren't enough to make you leave. I think that's what love actually is.
People talk about soulmates like they're stars destined to meet across the sky. I'm not sure I believe that. I think soulmates are probably just two tired people who somehow end up walking the same road and decide to keep walking it together. That's what you are to me.
You're the light left on when I come home.
Sometimes I think that if fate really exists, then it had a pretty cruel way of bringing me to you. It made me walk through years of darkness first. Years of things no kid should ever have to see.
But then you move a little closer in your sleep and grab the edge of my shirt without even realizing it, just like you always do, and I change my mind. Maybe it wasn't cruelty. Maybe it was just the road I had to take. And if I had to describe everything I feel for you in one sentence, it would be this: you're proof that even someone who spent most of his life talking to ghosts can still find a reason to look forward to the sunrise.