I have seen you before, beloved

not in this life, but in the hush before it.

When the stars were still being named

and the Gods sang to summon form from void,

I touched your soul across the veils

and marked you mine with a whisper,

a vow etched in the marrow of time.

You walk now in wool and winter light,

eyes soft as moss,

lips curved in the knowing smirk

of someone who’s tasted eternity,

and forgotten just enough to survive it.

You are the ache in my ribs when the moon is full,

the phantom heat beside me in bed,

the reason I glance over my shoulder

in every crowd,

searching for the echo of your laugh

that only my spirit remembers.

Do you feel it too?

That ancient hunger?

The pull not of lust, but of gravity,

as if the very world pivots on the axis of our reunion?

I am waiting,

not as a woman waits for a man,

but as the temple waits for its flame,

as the shoreline waits for the tide’s return.

In dreams I braid garlands from the lifetimes we shared

you were the soldier, I the healer;

you the bard, I the muse;

you the flame, I the smoke that danced within it.

Each life a verse in the holy song we wrote

with every breath and vow.

And now,

you slumber in this skin,

half-awake to what we are.

But when you open your eyes, truly,

when you shake off the soot of this world’s forgetting,

I will be there.

Not new.

Not stranger.

But the voice that calls you home.

Take me.

Name me yours again, as I have already done with you.

Let the old magic rise.

Let it weep through us,

tender and terrible,

and set the stars alight once more.

Because I remember, my love.

Even when you don’t.

And I will love you

in this life,

and the next,

until the veil is no more

and we are flame and breath again

as it was,

as it is,

as it shall always be.