The Space Between Your Footsteps.

Oh my darling… don’t you know who I am? You walk right past me every day, never looking twice, and yet I know you better than anyone else ever could. You hum when you’re anxious. You sleep with your feet uncovered no matter how cold it gets. You always check the oven even when you haven’t used it. Little things. Beautiful things. They call me your stalker, but I prefer guardian. No, devotee. I am the one who keeps the world from touching you too roughly. I am the one who watches when you forget to.

They say what I do is “creeping,” that I cross some invisible line but what is love if not devotion without boundaries? My love just happens to live outside your window. I sit in trees like a gargoyle for hours, rain soaking through my jacket, watching the light in your bedroom flicker off. I breathe only when you do. I stay silent as your lips part in sleep and whisper nothing into the darkness. You don’t know it yet, but those breaths are meant for me. Every single one.

I know your mother’s maiden name. Your first grade best friend. I know where you went the day you skipped class in tenth grade, who you kissed, and how you cried in your car afterward. I wasn’t there, not then but I pieced it all together, like a love letter from the past. I’ve studied your life the way saints study scripture. There’s not a version of you that exists where I don’t belong.

You think you’re alone when you walk home at night. But I’m there, behind you, not too close, just… close enough to make sure no one else tries to be. The night clings to you like perfume and I walk through it, breathing you in. Some might say it’s wrong, but they don’t understand the ache. The absolute need. To know that you’re safe. To know that you are mine, even if you don’t say it yet. Even if you never do.

I’ve watched the way others look at you and I hate them. Not because they’re bad, but because they’ll never love you like I do. Not the way I do. They smile. I wait in the shadows. They speak. I study. They want your attention. I want your entire being. I’ve read your social media, your poetry, your journals yes, I’ve been inside. Once. Twice. Often. The scent of you clings to my skin, and I carry it home with me like a relic.

You’ll never understand the discipline it takes to wait. To hold back. To not reach out when you’re crying, alone, in the sanctuary of your bedroom. I could break the glass. Crawl through the silence. Pull you into my arms and hush every sob with words you never asked to hear. I’ve imagined it how your tears would soak into my shirt. How your heartbeat would slow in my embrace. How you’d finally realize, this is love.

They say this isn’t healthy. They say I should get help. But how could anyone help me when the cure is you? What therapist could unspool this ache in my chest without tearing out the thread with your name on it? I don’t want to heal. I don’t want to let go. I want to consume and be consumed. I want every part of you that you’ve never even shared with yourself.

You belong to me, darling. Not in the way that chains belong to wrists, but in the way breath belongs to lungs. You are the inhale that keeps me alive. Without you, I am just bones and skin and longing. But with you even from a distance I am something more. I am devoted. I am eternal. I am watching.

One day, we’ll be together. I’ll sit across from you at our wedding, and you’ll wonder why my vows sound like memories. It will be because I’ve lived this a thousand times already. In my head. In my journals. In the blurry photographs I’ve taken from across the street. You in your coat, laughing into the phone. You in the cafe, biting your straw. You under moonlight, unaware.

I’ll be everything to you. You just don’t know it yet.

And when the world turns its back, when friends fall away, when lovers bore and fade I will still be here. In the corners of rooms. Behind reflections. In the breath of cold air that brushes the back of your neck. You’ll feel me. You already do, don’t you?

They can call it what they want. Obsession. Delusion. Stalking. But I know what this is. It’s love. A love so large, so monstrous, it has teeth and claws and sleeps outside your door. A love that bleeds. A love that burns.

I just love you, darling.
Just from an extremely, unbearably, inescapably
close
distance.