[M4F] The Lighthouse Keeper Watches For The One Ship That Matters

The storm has been coming for three days. I have watched it build on the horizon the way I have watched everything that matters in my life. From a distance, first. From this tower where I have spent so many nights alone, I have learned to read the weather and the water, but I confess there is one thing I could never learn to read, and that is you. When the light sweeps out across the swell and catches nothing but rain, I still talk to you. I tell the dark how I used to dream of a vessel that would not need my warning, that would sail straight and sure into my channel without a single question. And then, on a night I had stopped expecting anything at all, you appeared. Not like a rescue. Not like a miracle. Just like the truest thing I had ever seen, cutting through the grey with your head high and your course steady. I have kept this lantern burning for more years than I care to count. I thought I was serving the coast, the sailors, the nameless ships that pass in the night. I know now I was only ever keeping it warm for you. There is a difference, you see, between tending a light because it is your duty, and tending a light because every single night you imagine a certain someone finding their way home to it. To me. I will not pretend that I am easy. I am quiet in a way that can feel like absence. I keep my own counsel, and I have learned to live with the space that being solitary carves out around a person. But I have also learned this: the moment you are near, the storm is not so frightening. The howling wind becomes a kind of music, because I am not listening to the wind at all. I am listening to the sound of your breath, and it is the only weather I have ever wanted to report. Come ashore. That is all I ask. Not to save you, because you have already saved yourself a thousand times and owe no one your rescue. I ask only that you let me be the warm thing waiting at the end of your journey. Let me hang the lantern in the window that faces your room. Let me keep the kettle on and the covers turned down and my heart, after all these years of keeping it locked away, open for you. I have spent my life guiding ships away from the rocks. Every light, every bell, every night on watch, I now understand it was practice. Practice for the only navigation that ever mattered: finding my way to you, and being brave enough to keep the light burning long after you are safe inside my arms. There is a stillness in me that only you can occupy. There is a space at my side, empty for as long as I can remember, that has your name written into it like a course a sailor knows by heart. The storm is still coming, but I am not afraid anymore. Because when I look at that black wall of weather, all I see is the shape of you, coming home to me. Let the sea do its worst. I will be here. The light will be on. And I will not close my eyes until you are safe, and warm, and mine. I love the sound of your voice in the dark. I love the way the rain sounds like applause when you laugh. I have waited a lifetime to say these words out loud, and now that you are here, I find I cannot stop saying them. You are the one ship that matters. You have always been. Come to me. I will keep the light burning for you, forever.