There’s a certain hush to Sunday afternoons—the kind that invites sentiment without asking for attention. I glanced toward you curled on my reading chair, your legs tucked beneath a worn blanket that smells faintly of cedar and orange peel.

“You always watch me like I’m about to do something extraordinary,” I murmured, not quite looking up from the spread of antique poetry chapbooks fanned across my desk. You shrugged, smiling, that soft-lipped, knowing smile that unwinds the tension in my shoulders.

“I’ve been archiving these,” I said, gesturing to the pile with ink-stained fingers. “Each one contains fragments of lost voices—women who wrote about grief like it was sacred, men who hid love inside metaphors. I want to preserve them before they vanish.”

I didn’t expect you to say much, but you crossed the room instead, knelt beside me, and traced the spine of a century-old book as if it were alive. That reverence—the way you touched my world without hesitation—settled something inside me.

Later, when I let you listen to a draft of my spoken word piece—just a minute of breath and rhythm and longing—you didn’t comment on the cadence or the rhyme. You whispered, “That sounds like the way you love.”

I think that was the moment I realized my hobbies weren’t hobbies when you were part of them. They were offerings. Portals. Ways to remember myself through your eyes.