I ask your forgiveness for loving you so suddenly! Though my love is an old refrain worn thin in your ear... From those hours I spent lingering in the shadow of your gestures, Drinking from your mouth the fragrance of your smiles. From the nights I lived, warmed by the unresolved grace of your eternally vanishing footsteps, I bring the tenderness of those who accept me with longing. And I can tell you that the great love I leave with you carries no exasperation of tears, no allure of promises, nor the mysterious whispers that veil the soul... It is a quiet pilgrimage, an outpouring of caresses, and it asks only that you rest in stillness, in profound stillness, and let the warm hands of night find, without compulsion, the steady gaze of dawn.
# Tenderness I can offer you nothing but tenderness— a word worn smooth as river stone, passing hand to hand through centuries. Look how it settles in the hollow of a palm, how it asks nothing of you but presence, the ordinary alchemy of one breath near another. I have seen it in small things: a mother's finger tracing the fever-line of her child's brow, the way old hands find each other in the dark, still knowing the landscape of familiar skin. It is not love's thunder or passion's wild arithmetic— it is the quiet that comes after, the gentle weight of what endures. You may take it or leave it, this tenderness, this worn coin I press into your palm. It will not buy you kingdoms or keep the world's hunger at bay, but on a night when loneliness crowds close as breath, it might be enough— this small, persistent warmth, this stubborn insistence that we are not wholly alone.
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