I folded paper into impossible geometries— each crease a prayer, each angle a small architecture of longing. The planes I launched were clumsy birds learning flight from the dictionary of my hands. I refolded them. Again. Again. Believed the things I thought meant something would find their way through air to where you breathed.

But momentum is a shoreline. And the air beneath those wings was only air—thin, uncommitted, the way a promise thins when held too close. How could I expect it to bear the weight of dreams, that particular heaviness disguised as paper?

The message never arrived.

Then came the boats, small and deliberate, their hulls heavy with cargo— not glass bottles but the bottles themselves, poems folded into keels, verses pressed into sails. I wrote you in lines and pictures, in the syntax of longing, in feelings I could only name by building something to contain them.

But a current is just water with direction. The paper drank itself fat, softened, surrendered its form. It was meant for a moment, I know this now, how it stayed there, motionless, while everything written sank like a stone wearing your name.

Paper airplanes. Paper boats. At the bottom of a ravine, at the bottom of a lake, they made no music. Not even a note. Just the quiet of things that have given up their shape, crumpled, smudged, waterlogged— the archaeology of failed attempts.

But look closer. The lines are still there. Time has marked them but not erased them. If you really look, you can trace the intended folds, the deliberate design, the vessel meant to carry three words that contain every word I know:

You are loved.

Thought of in the morning light, when coffee cools and the world hasn’t arrived yet. Dreamed with in that blue hour between sleep and waking. Planned with in the cartography of somedays, included in the small weather of my everyday,

The messages may never reach you. But I keep planning, penning, forming, sending, a constancy like breathing, like the moon’s dumb loyalty to the tide.

Because someday you might see the mass of rubble I’ve made: paper boats stacked like a flooded memory, paper planes reaching into sky with their creased wings still hoping,

and you might wonder about the love, the person behind this relentless geometry, who sent them so many times, unread, unheard, who understood that sometimes you just have to make things that move, launch them into air or water, hope they take flight, hope they never sink,

even knowing—especially knowing— they will.