When the Armor Meets the Mask

Some crossings are chance.

Some are lessons dressed in temporary skin.

And then there are the rare ones—

the ones that feel less like coincidence

and more like the quiet unfolding of something

that was always meant to find its way back to you.

 

When he appeared, there was no grand arrival,

just a gentle presence—soft but certain,

like the sound of water against stone,

shaping without force, carving without demand.

 

Maybe he is here to help me unfasten this armor

that I have worn like a second skin.

It has served me—kept my heart upright

when the world tried to bend it,

kept my spirit whole when love came as a lesson instead of a home.

But even the strongest armor grows heavy

when what you crave is to feel,

to breathe,

to let someone close enough to touch the places

you once protected with silence.

 

And perhaps I am here for him, too.

To meet his stillness not as rejection,

but as the language of someone who has survived

by being careful with his heart.

His mask is not deception—it is a medicine bundle

he learned to carry in a world that does not always honor soft men.

I don’t want to rip it away;

I want to stand near enough, steady enough,

that he chooses to lower it when he is ready.

 

There is ceremony in this kind of meeting.

Something older than coincidence,

older than the way we measure time.

It feels like the ancestors whispered,

"Now."

As if they cleared a path through all the wrong turns,

all the ache and the almosts,

just to bring us to this moment—

not perfect, but prepared.

 

I am learning that not every connection is meant to consume.

Some are meant to grow steady like roots beneath snow,

waiting for spring,

trusting the thaw will come.

This feels like that:

inevitable, not because it is owed to me,

but because it arrived in its own season,

and I am ready this time—

not desperate, not guarded,

but open enough to let it unfold.

 

So I will not rush this.

I will not demand from it

what it has not yet spoken.

I will walk with it,

like you walk with a new trail you feel in your bones was always there—

you just hadn’t turned your face that way yet.

 

If he helps me shed the weight of what no longer serves,

and I help him breathe in the safety of being fully seen,

maybe we will find that what lies beneath

is not a perfect story,

but a true one.

One stitched with patience,

held by something greater than chance,

and blessed by the knowing

that some meetings are not random—

they are remembered.

💕🫖 JRT 

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