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He left something here for you.
👆 Tap the envelope to open it
Before you open this.
Know that every word in here is the truest thing I have ever written.
I need to tell you something I have never been able to say out loud.
I love you. Not in the easy, comfortable way. In the terrifying way. The way that made me lie awake at night wondering if I was worthy of you. The way that made the thought of losing you feel like losing air.
That is why I went quiet. Not because I didn't love you. Because I loved you too much to keep showing up broken. You deserved more than a man handing you pieces of himself and calling it a relationship.
The arguments. The swinging back and forth. That was not me falling out of love. That was me drowning under the weight of everything I am carrying, and not knowing how to ask you to just sit with me in the water.
I went away so I could come back whole. So that when I looked at you, I would only see you. Not my fear. Not my doubt. Just you.
This part is harder.
During those days of silence, I sat with myself and asked the ugliest question a man can ask. Am I enough for her? Not someday. Right now. Am I the person she deserves to give her love to?
Because here is the truth about me, Toria.
I am building NOLAP.I can go a whole day consumed by it. By the ideas, the pressure, the vision I am trying to bring to life. That is not something that will change. You would be loving a founder. A man whose mind never fully rests. And I needed you to walk into that with your eyes fully open.
But I also sat with another truth. In all those days away, the thing I missed most was not silence. It was not peace. It was you.
Buying kenkey and sitting with you. The way we are together when no one is watching. Those moments felt more like home than anywhere I have ever been.
My aunty helped me see it. She said the fact that you understand me. That you have never asked me to be less. That you love me even inside my storm. That is not ordinary, Mortoti. That is rare.
And she was right.
You did not sign up for a finished man. You signed up for this man. The one still building. Still figuring it out. Still learning how to love properly. And you stayed anyway.
You stayed when I made it hard. You stayed when I went quiet. You left space for me to come back, and you were still there when I did.
That is the kind of love that changes a man.
I am not staying because you are amazing. I am staying because I am completely, irrevocably in love with you. And I am done running from that.
Right now I am standing outside in the village searching for internet to send you this. Because even in the middle of everything, you are what I reach for.
You placed aside your comfort to love me. You never made me feel like a burden for being complicated. You just stayed. Quietly. Stubbornly. Beautifully.
I see that, Toria. I see every bit of it.
We do not know where this road ends. But I know that I want to walk it with you. I want to buy kenkey and sit in the sun with you. I want to pray with you in the mornings. I want to build something the world has never seen, and I want to come home to you at the end of every day.
I am not with you because you are patient with me. I am with you because you are the only person who has ever made me feel like myself.
I love you, Toria. I always have. I always will. I have missed you every single hour.