A Poem for You
Original poetry — verses written from lived experience.
A Poem for You
Original verse. Written not from books but from mornings that arrived too quickly, nights that lasted exactly long enough, and the strange certainty that some connections were decided before either person was born.
The Field
There's a field between what I am
and what I want to be —
Rumi said he'd meet us there.
I found you instead.
Standing where the grass bends
under the weight of its own growing,
you were not waiting.
You were already whole.
And that is why I stayed.
Amsterdam Morning
The canal doesn't rush.
It holds the sky without gripping,
reflects the bicycles without counting them,
moves the boats without asking where.
That's how you love.
I stand at the window in IJburg
and the sunrise finds us
the way it always does —
unhurried, certain,
painting the water gold
because that's what light does
when it has nowhere else to be.
Two Languages
You taught me that love
is not a language I speak
but a language I learn
every morning
when you say something in Vietnamese
I don't understand
but somehow already know.
And I say something in German
that sounds too hard for what I mean
but you hear the softness underneath
the way you always do.
Between us, we have invented
a third language
that has no words
and never mistranslates.
The Quiet One
You are the quiet one.
Not quiet like empty.
Quiet like deep water.
Quiet like the moment before music begins.
In a world that rewards noise,
you chose presence.
In a world that celebrates the loud,
you became the stillness
that every loud thing
eventually comes home to.
Eight Years
In the first year, I learned your name.
In the second, your rhythm.
In the third, your silence — what it means
when you go quiet, and what it means
when you come back.
In the fourth year, I stopped counting
because love is not arithmetic.
It is geology.
Slow. Layered. Permanent.
And now — year eight —
I know you the way I know gravity:
not because I studied it,
but because I have always
been falling toward you.
The Promise
I will not promise you forever.
Forever is a word for people
who have not yet discovered
that today is harder and braver.
I promise you today.
And then tomorrow, I'll promise it again.
And the day after.
Not because I'm uncertain.
Because choosing you once
was the easiest decision I ever made.
Choosing you every morning
is the most meaningful.
For Tien. For Amsterdam. For eight years of choosing.