I want to say thank you, please, I love you so many times that the words become a prayer. I want to hold eye contact and smile with warmth long enough for a nervous heart to steady. I want to listen until sorrow speaks in a dialect I can understand. Because once, when I was all edge, someone handed me gentleness I had not earned, and it softened... See more

To love humans is not optimism; it requires an unrelenting, deliberate faith, the stubborn act of catching every dropped match and insisting it can still light a candle. It is choosing to notice the softness happening everywhere: a stranger pressing tissues into another’s palm, a barista sliding an extra biscuit across the counter, the way a lover... See more