I See You / We Are That We Are

I see you.

Not as a moment,

not as a problem to be solved,

not as a fragile thing to be carried,

but as a living current,

a pulse that moves through the room

and through me,

and through every version of ourselves

we’ve been forced to abandon

and reclaim again.

I see you

in the laughter that comes too loud

and the silence that comes too long,

in the love of long drives we have yet to take,

where the road will carry music and possibility,

where hours might stretch

so we can spill ourselves into the world

without shame, without pause,

telling stories we would never tell anyone else.

I see you

in the tremor of grief that still rises

when nothing else remains,

in the ache that proves love is true,

and sorrow is its measure.

We have learned the rites

that ask for no armor,

that demand no obedience,

that honor the nakedness of presence.

I see you

in every shadowed corner of our lives,

in the cracks where the light always finds its way,

in the foolish courage it took

to stand there, fully human,

exposed to the wind,

to each other,

to the edges of our own hearts.

I see you

and I am not afraid

of the dark

or of what remains unspoken.

The dark is also a teacher,

the unspoken a door

to the living pulse beneath control,

beneath expectation,

beneath every self we thought we knew.

I see you.

I see you in the flawed, in the holy,

in the impossibly ordinary moments

that carry the weight of eternity.

I see you,

and in seeing, I am seen

and together we do not fall.

I see you,

and this is the threshold

where grief meets joy,

where sorrow becomes the language of belonging,

where intervulnerability is salvation,

where we recognize each other

not as objects to be defined

but as mirrors of the same fire.

I see you.

And now we breathe together,

and the pulse beneath the pulse rises,

and the current carries a new truth:

We are that we are, and we know.

We are the echo of every self we have been,

the witness to every sorrow we survived,

the memory of every laugh,

every foolish act of courage

that brought us to this moment.

We are the river of being flowing through the cracks

of our lives,

the light that finds its way in

not by force,

not by design,

but because it cannot do otherwise.

We are that we are, and we know.

Every version of ourselves

dwells in the other,

as the other dwells in us.

Every grief, every love, every error

is a knot in the tapestry of what is,

and what is cannot be untangled,

only honored.

We have learned to see,

to hear,

to open our hearts without claiming,

without bending,

without erasing.

We are that we are, and we know.

There is no need for words to prove it,

no altar, no witness beyond our own breathing.

The world may try to define us,

to instruct us in who we should be,

but here

at the wild edge of sorrow,

in the holy exhaustion of love,

we are enough.

We are the music, the laughter, the tears,

the long hours, the roads we have yet to travel,

the openness to being known.

We are that we are, and we know.

We walk forward together,

through the long hallways of grief,

through the cliffs of emptiness

where falling once seemed inevitable,

through the alleys of shame

that tried to shrink our spirits.

And still we rise,

again and again,

because rising is our rite,

because every step is a song,

every breath a witness,

every glance a testament

to the truth that we belong

to each other,

to the village,

to the river of being itself.

We are that we are, and we know.

And at the heart of it,

we feel the pulse of everything

the wind, the dark, the laughter, the ache,

the gifts we carry for each other,

for the village, for the cosmos,

for the living, breathing world.

We are that too.

We are that too.

And we know.