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The other day, as we left the gym, I told K I was going to start writing again. “OK, babe,” he nodded, shifting into reverse. His hands rested easy on the wheel, eyes on the road. I stared out the passenger window, a familiar weight settling in my chest.

He knows I used to write. He knows I want to write. He knows, in theory, that writing was once a passion of mine. But he has never actually seen me do it. He has no real frame of reference for what it looks like when I disappear into a project, when an idea locks onto my mind like a vice, when I stay up all night writing feverishly, exhausted but wired, more alive than I’ve felt in days.

He doesn’t know that writing isn’t just something I do; it’s something that happens to me. It’s how I process, obsess, unravel, rebuild. He’s never witnessed how it consumes me, how I forget to eat, how time dissolves, how I stare at a single sentence for an hour because something about it isn’t sitting right. He’s never woken up at 3 AM to find me sitting in the dark, phone in hand, frantically typing before the thought slips away.

I told him I was going to start writing again. I don’t think he understands what that actually means. But that’s not his fault.

Every other partner I’ve had has been a creative, musicians and artists mainly, men who lived inside their own heads the way I do. They didn’t have to tolerate my madness; they lived it in their own world. They knew what it felt like to be consumed by an idea, to stay up all night chasing something intangible, to go silent mid-conversation because a thought had hijacked their mind. They knew the rush of inspiration. The ache of chasing something just out of reach. The thrill of creation and the urgency of stepping outside the rhythms of daily life to see it through.

It was always the same: I’d meet a guy, we’d drown in each other, we’d inevitably tear each other apart, and then he’d turn our wreckage into a song or a mixtape. I’d disappear into my own creative process, finding poetry in the aftermath. Then it was on to the next, or back again. A cycle of craving and collateral damage. One I eventually, intentionally, and thankfully broke.

Somewhere along the line, I became too comfortable with chaos, addicted to the artistry of heartbreak. Toxicity defined nearly all of my relationships, until the damage stopped fueling my creative pursuits and started poisoning my actual life. I knew I had to make a change. I planned to. But it wasn’t until I faced real consequences that I actually did.

My whole life fell apart, in ways I don’t care to revisit at this moment. Shit changed. I broke into a thousand little pieces and I’m still learning how to live with the person I became after.

And then, when I needed him most, I met K.

K is different from anyone I’ve ever dated. Steady. Kind. Secure. He doesn’t disappear when things get hard. He doesn’t throw love like a grenade, only to pull the pin when I get too close. He is present, predictable in a way that makes me feel safe. For the first time in my life, I have a love that doesn’t exhaust me.

Things are pure and steady. I enjoy a kind of peace and security I never thought I could have. We wake up together, move through the day together. Our relationship is built on acts of service, on presence, on the quiet understanding that neither of us is going anywhere.

But sometimes, I can’t help but wonder, does he really know me?

We have both acknowledged this awkward distance in our relationship. There is a gap between who we are, who I used to be and how much I have chosen to reveal. We have, so far, learned to live with it. It is not a threat. It is not a wound. It is just there. A quiet, unspoken thing.

And I have told myself that this is what I need. That I do not need to be understood the way I once was because I’m not even that person anymore. And love does not need to consume me and bring out waves of emotion and dysfunctional passion in order to be real. Stability matters more to me than intensity. He gives me that. It’s what I want.

But then, as I sit down to write for the first time in two years, something shifts.

I thought I could ease back into writing like slipping into an old habit. But as soon as I put pen to paper to check in with myself, I felt it…an ache, a hesitation. The words didn’t come as easily as I expected. They tugged at something buried, something I had been careful not to touch. And for the first time in a long time, I had to ask myself something I wasn’t sure I was ready to face. Who the fuck am I when I’m not trying so hard to be at peace?

Writing doesn’t just reignite my creative spirit, it forces me to confront myself in a way that nothing else does. It demands radical honesty. It asks me to look at what I have been avoiding. And as I let the words spill out, I can’t help but feel the space in my relationship more clearly than ever.

I told K I was going to start writing again but writing again doesn’t just mean writing again. In a way it means stepping back into a version of myself that he has never met. It means pulling something, or someone, forward that I have quietly let sit in the background. And I don’t know if that will bring us closer or make the distance between us more obvious.

Or if, for the first time, I’ll have to choose between the two.