A love that lingers even in the shadows.

Some souls meet once and drift apart. Ours refused to. We first crossed paths as freshmen, two strangers in the same halls, unaware that time was already weaving our story together. By junior year, fate grew impatient. He reached out first, brave and certain. I made him wait to hear I love you, but when I finally said it, it was because my heart already knew where it belonged. Being with him felt like stillness. I was seen exactly as I was: energetic, strange, stubborn, full of storm, and loved without condition. For the first time, I never felt the need to be anyone else. After a year together, life pulled us apart for three long years. But even in the silence, there was a quiet certainty that this was not the end. When we found each other again, it did not feel like a reunion. It felt like destiny correcting itself. He is my calm where I am fire, laughter to my chaos, steady where I am electric. Together we built a world of late nights, shared stories, and simply being side by side. On a historic bridge, with my best friend and my daughter there, he asked me to walk beside him for the rest of our lives. In that moment, I held a certainty I had carried for years. Some love stories are fleeting. Ours is stubborn. Ours is eternal. Ours was always going to be us. “After all this time?” “Always” - Severus Snape