Sit With Me

What most of us need, in the end, isn’t rescue.
We don't want perfection.
Not even answers.

What we hope for is someone who won’t recoil when the whole truth is laid in their hands. Someone who doesn’t excuse their silence with policy, or bury their fear beneath precedent.

Silence, wearing the mask of prudence, is still silence.
And thoughts and prayers, no matter how earnest, cannot hold a trembling hand.

Sit with us. Not around us.
Not as a task to be completed. Not as a file to be shut. Not as a liability to be lessened.

But as a witness. As a human being.

We knew how to do this as children. We knew how to lean our shoulders into one another and wait out the storm, how to share a blanket without asking what it would cost. It was the most ordinary thing in the world to us. We didn’t know it was radical.

We forget as we grow older, when courage becomes costly and empathy gets repackaged as risk. We tell ourselves there is safety in delay. We name our withdrawal as wisdom. While the wounded are left to piece themselves together in silence.

But love isn’t silent.
Love is not afraid to sit in the ruins.
Love does not mistake listening for danger.
Love does not pass by on the other side of the road.

Sit with me, love says.
Gather the courage to look.
Stay long enough to listen.
And love hard enough to learn.