Anisa the most beautiful girl in the world

My dearest Anisa,

I started writing this because there are things I need you to know, and sometimes a single text, a single call, a single I miss you across the miles doesn't carry enough of it. So I built you a whole little world instead. One you can come back to, any time, at any hour, in any mood.

You don't have to read it all at once. You don't have to read it in order. You can scroll slow. You can scroll fast. You can scroll all the way down to the cards when you just need someone to hold you for a moment — that's what they're for.

But first, while you're here, let me just say: you are, without exaggeration, the most beautiful person I have ever known. Not only in the way the word is usually meant — though you are that too, so much that it sometimes makes me forget to speak — but beautiful in the deeper sense. In the way you laugh. In the way you care. In the way you exist in a room.

Here are some of the things I notice about you — the small, ordinary things that most people would never think to say out loud, but that live rent-free in my head most days:

The way your eyes narrow slightly when you're trying not to laugh at something you think you shouldn't laugh at. The sound of your voice the moment before you actually start speaking, when you're gathering the words. How you listen — really listen, like whatever I'm saying is the only thing happening in the world at that moment. The way you hold a cup of tea with both hands.

I notice when you're tired before you say it. I notice when you're quiet because you're thinking, and when you're quiet because something hurts. I can tell them apart now, after all this time, and I want you to know that — because the distance makes it easy to feel unseen, and I never want you to feel unseen by me. I see you, habibti. Always.

There's a softness to you that the world hasn't managed to take. That, more than anything, is what makes you beautiful to me. You've had every reason to harden and you chose not to. You chose kindness. You chose openness. You chose me, even when it wasn't easy, and I will spend whatever time we have trying to be worthy of that choice.

I know there are days when the distance feels like a weight you shouldn't have to carry. When the time zones are cruel, when the Wi-Fi drops at the worst moment, when my hands aren't there to hold yours and a voice on a screen isn't the same as a voice in the room.

I know. I feel it too. Some nights I close my laptop and the silence afterward is deafening.

But Anisa — listen. The distance is not what we are. It is just where we are, for now. What we are is the thousand small, brave choices we make every day to keep choosing each other. What we are is the way I still think about you before I fall asleep and as soon as I wake up. What we are is the knowing, deep down, that this is the real thing, and real things are worth the wait.

The highway between here and you has a name in my head. The flight path is memorized. Every trip, every landing, every moment I see you standing there waiting — that's what I'm living for. The rest is just the space in between.