Before the journey: a letter

My love: before a single road is drawn or a single cafe named, this page belongs to you. I love you because you are the smartest person in every room and somehow also the most curious one; because your brilliance never shows off, it simply illuminates. I love the way your mind works like a lantern in an old library: it does not just read the world, it finds the secret passages in it.

I love that you are beautiful in the way that makes strangers lose their sentences, and that you seem entirely unaware of it. Your red hair is the only sunset I never want to end. There is something mysterious in you, something the old poets would have written about in the margins where no one was supposed to look: a magical aura, quiet and certain, that turns ordinary streets into stories.

So this week is not a holiday. It is a spell we cast together: seven days in the old lands between two kingdoms, where astronomers owned islands, giants hold up cathedrals, and stones stand in ships that sail nowhere but toward the sun. Every card in this deck is only an offering. We choose each morning, over breakfast, like drawing cards from a deck.

All I truly want to see this week is you, laughing somewhere by the water.

— yours, entirely