Somehow, somewhere love still exists. It seems to me to be a concept that is still difficult to define. Getting out of a long term relationship in 2025 was an eye opener for this. For a while I just wanted to have sex like a man. Enjoy it, not worrying about what I looked like or if I appealed to men. I wanted to feel powerful in my own body again, to take instead of constantly giving, to stop performing for anyone’s approval but my own.
I told myself I was done looking for anything real. That love was something other people found, in films and in stories people told to make heartbreak feel worth it. I built walls without even realising, convincing myself that being guarded was the same thing as being healed.
And suddenly he appeared. When you have no hope for love a glimmer of light appears. And for a moment you forget all the people who hurt you, and you feel good. You’re in love. It’s strange how quickly the walls come down when the right person doesn’t even try to knock them over, they just exist beside you, patient, until you realise you don’t need them anymore.
In a city that is so dreary and miserable, you really don’t know who to trust. I was never a big fan of London, the crowds and the people made it insufferable. I hated how oversaturated and cliche it was, how everyone seemed to be rushing somewhere without ever really arriving. It felt like a city built for people passing through, not people trying to stay.
However, seeing him in the midst of the big buildings and city lights made me realise. It’s the people around you who make a place so beautiful. The same streets I once resented started to feel different, not because London changed, but because I had someone to walk them with who made the noise feel quieter.
He brightens the streets, every time I see him with those sparkly eyes in the summer heat my heart tightens and it grows with more love and adoration from each second. There’s something about the way he looks at me, like I’m not a puzzle he’s trying to solve or a past he’s trying to untangle, just someone he wants to know as I am, right now.
He is the kind of guy who doesn’t see me for my past which is funny because every man I’ve met has cared so much who I’ve been with and what I’ve done. Defining my life experiences as who I am as a person, as if the people I loved before somehow left permanent fingerprints on my worth. With him, my past feels like exactly that, past. Not evidence, not a warning label, just a part of the story that got me here. And for the first time in a long time, that feels like enough.
-C
DEVOTION 