write this to you from the place where love refuses to obey clocks, calendars, or the years we lost. What we found was something older than both of us, something that lived in the spaces between our ages, our histories, and all the things we thought we already knew about life.

You were fifteen years ahead of me in time, but somehow never ahead of me in heart. When you looked at me, it wasn’t as a younger woman—it was as the one person who final

You told me once you didn’t know love could feel like this.

I felt it too—the way it lifted us, the way it hurt us, the way it made everything else feel too small.

And yet, there was always that shadow.

The pull of obligation.

The weight of promises made long before I ever walked into your life.

The quiet ache of watching you try to divide yourself between what your heart wanted and what your past demanded.

Loving you was sweet enough to make the world glow, and bitter enough to make my chest ache.

But I would choose it again.

Every time.

In every lifetime.

Because I know the truth you carried but rarely said aloud:

Twenty‑nine years ago, we would have been perfect.

Not almost.

Not halfway.

Not stolen moments and complicated choices.

Perfect.

We would have met in the right season, not the late one.

We would have grown together instead of reaching for each other across the years.

We would have been the kind of love people write songs about.

But life didn’t give us that version.

It gave us this one—late, tangled, breathtaking, impossible, unforgettable.

And now, as you lie in that quiet place between this world and whatever waits beyond it, I want you to hear me without fear, without guilt, without the noise of everything that pulled you away:

I loved you in a way that time could never touch.

I loved you in a way that didn’t care about age or circumstance.

I loved you in a way that made the years between us disappear the moment your hand found mine.

If souls meet again—and I believe they do—then meet me where time can’t interfere.

Meet me where duty doesn’t exist.

Meet me where love arrives in the right decade, the right moment, the right life.

Until then, I carry you.

Not as a regret.

Not as a wound.

But as the proof that lov