Unfinished Beside Your Light

I love you
in the quiet way a shoreline loves the sea—
knowing each wave will touch it
and still belong to something deeper,
something vast
it can never hold.

You walk through the world with light in your hands,
as if kindness were effortless,
as if grace were simply the way you breathe.
And I stand beside you
counting my flaws like loose change,
wondering how someone so whole
could ever choose someone still unfinished.

You deserve poetry written in certainty,
not verses shaped by doubt.
You deserve a man without hesitation,
without shadows trailing behind his name.
Yet here I am—
loving you with trembling honesty,
afraid my heart is both my greatest gift
and my greatest insufficiency.

I watch the way you smile at small things,
how compassion finds you first in every room,
how your laughter repairs parts of me
I never admitted were broken.
You do not see what I see—
the distance between who I am
and who I believe you deserve.

Loving you feels like standing beneath stars,
aware they are beautiful
because they are unreachable.
Still, I make wishes I pretend not to make,
hopes I pretend not to carry.

If I am not enough,
it is not because my love is small—
it is because you are extraordinary,
and loving you demands a better version of me
than I have yet become.

So I try.
Quietly.
Daily.
Not to earn you—
but to grow into the man
who can stand beside your light
without feeling the need to apologize for his shadow.

And if someday you look at me
and see worth where I see doubt,
know this truth has always lived here:

I may believe I am not good enough for you,
but I have never loved you
with anything less
than everything I am.

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