The weight of being seen

I watched you the way people watch fire. Not because I was afraid, though fear lingered somewhere close to my ribs, but because there is something hypnotic about your trembling. A living flame, never still, always flickering between triumph and collapse.

You stood before them, before the faceless crowd, and I thought: this is it. This is your moment. The moment when the hours of sleepless nights, the prayers whispered into stale air, the debts and the aches and the breaking—all of it—would finally mean something.

And it did. And it didn’t.

You rose higher than I thought anyone could, but I could see the shaking. I could see the cracks forming in your expression, that small twitch around your mouth you thought no one would notice. To them, you looked victorious. To me, you looked like a person about to break.

I loved you more in that moment than I ever had before. Because I knew the truth. I knew that you were not a statue of victory but a body that had fought through fear and guilt and sleepless hunger. I knew that what they applauded wasn’t your success, but your survival.

And survival is its own kind of trembling glory.

Chapter II – The Real World

We live in a world that asks us to be more than human. Every day, the noise of it pounds against our skulls—money, names, comparisons, endless proof of worth demanded like blood payment.

I’ve watched you suffocate beneath it. The bills stacked on the counter like accusations, the endless scrolling on a glowing screen that whispers you are not enough. I’ve seen you shake in fear that you will not survive, even though survival is the only thing you’ve been doing since the beginning.

I’ve seen you wake in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, clutching your chest as though the weight of being alive was pressing too hard against you. And I’ve held you then, whispering things I wasn’t even sure I believed: you are enough, you are enough, you are enough.

And maybe I wasn’t saying it for you at all. Maybe I was saying it for me. Because this world suffocates me too. And loving you doesn’t save me from it—it drags me deeper.

But that’s what makes it real.

Chapter III – The Body as Proof

When we make love, it is not tender. It is survival. It is proof that we are still here, still breathing, still capable of wanting and being wanted.

I have felt your body shake beneath my hands, not just with desire but with something rawer—fear, desperation, hunger for a kind of relief the world never gives. When you kiss me, I feel the guilt and regret woven into it, as though you’re begging me to forgive you for things you haven’t even done yet.

And I do. I forgive you every time. Because I need the same forgiveness. Because in the moments when you are inside me, when I feel your skin and your sweat and your trembling breath, I can almost believe that we are more than what the world has made us.

Sex is not escape. It is confrontation. It is the fire that burns away the masks, the lies, the suffocating need to be someone other than who we already are.

I love you most in those moments when you are undone, when the world cannot touch you, when you are nothing but flesh and heartbeat and trembling.

And I hate it too. Because I know it will end. And when it ends, the world will return with its teeth bared.

Chapter IV – Failures and Happiness

Your failures are mine. I feel them like bruises on my own skin. When you stumble, I fall with you. When you break, I shatter too.

And yet—your happiness is also mine. The sound of your laughter, the light in your eyes when something finally goes right, the way you glow when you forget for just a second how heavy everything is.

That’s what I’ve learned: failure and happiness matter equally. They are the same blood running through different veins. One does not exist without the other. And to love you is to bleed with you, through both.

I remember one night, when we had nothing. The fridge empty, the heat barely working, both of us counting coins like they were jewels. You looked at me and laughed. I don’t even remember what was funny. I just remember the way your face lit up, the way I thought, God, if this is what happiness is, I’ll take it, even like this.

We were starving, but we were alive. And in that moment, it mattered.

Chapter V – Suffocation of Love

Love is not gentle. Love is a hand around the throat, a weight on the chest, a fire in the lungs.

I suffocate under it. I drown in the way I need you, in the way I can’t imagine a world without you even though the world keeps trying to convince me I should. I choke on the nights when you pull away, when your silence becomes louder than any argument. I suffocate when I realize that no matter how much I love you, I cannot save you from the world, from yourself, from the trembling that never leaves your body.

But love is also the only breath I have. When I taste your skin, when I feel your heartbeat pressed against mine, when I see you smile despite it all—I breathe again.

It is unbearable. It is holy. It is both.

Chapter VI – What Matters

The truth is, nothing matters. The world will keep spinning, bills will keep piling, time will keep erasing everything we build. Nothing lasts. Nothing is safe.

And yet—everything matters. Every kiss, every touch, every tremble of your hands as you hold mine. Every failure, every laugh, every desperate night when we cling to each other like we are the last two people alive.

What matters is not that we win. What matters is that we are here, together, burning, suffocating, surviving.

I see you. I see the way you shake, the way you break, the way you rise again even when you don’t want to. And that is enough.

Epilogue – Enough

If I could say one thing to you, if I could carve it into the air so it would never fade, it would be this:

You are enough.

Not because you succeed, not because you fail, not because you are strong or beautiful or brilliant—though you are all of those things. You are enough because you are. Because you tremble and I see you. Because you fall and still rise. Because you love me, even when it suffocates us both.

The world will keep demanding more. It will keep trying to convince us we are nothing. But I know the truth.

We are already something.

And that something is enough.