Where the Storm Rests
By Wandelstorm
🌿 This is hope. A glimpse of a future not guaranteed, but possible. A vision of what it might feel like to be seen, held, and never asked to shrink again. There is a cottage at the edge of the woods in the Netherlands. Weathered and old, alive with a soul you can feel in the grain of its beams and the creak of its floorboards. The wild North Sea is close. I can hear it in the wind that moves through the trees and tastes of salt.There is a private path, soft with moss, that winds from the garden to the waves, past a stream and ancient trees. In the windows: wildflowers. Not arranged, not trimmed, just gathered. Like joy after rain. There is a swing tied to an old branch and a worn bench that holds stones. A rug that’s frayed at the corners because it’s loved, not replaced. The mugs don’t match, the chairs are all wrong. It is perfectly mismatched and honest. The mornings are slow. The sun slips through the curtains while we lie tangled in warmth and presence; unhurried; unseen; real. Sometimes we stay like that all day, drinking bad coffee and eating burnt toast made with pride and a grin. Sometimes we walk to the sea with coffee in mismatched thermoses, sharing squashed pocket stroopwafels. Sometimes it is pancakes and laughter in a coffee shop, with sticky-syrupy fingers; sometimes it is walking hand in hand by a canal, fingers intertwined like it is the most natural thing in the world. And sometimes it is music and movement, and Amsterdam neon, dance and jagged nights of wild passion and reckless joy under a sky full of noise. He is not a saviour, not an idea, but a mirror in motion. He brings roots and wildflowers and I keep every one, all delivered with pride and an excited grin. He holds my hand like it is the most obvious thing in the world, he sings with me in the rain, he matches my scream in the storm. He does not flinch when I burn, and does not shrink when I go quiet; he is not afraid of me, and I am not afraid of him. We see each other completely. We do not flinch. We meet, we witness, with reverence and love. My work is sacred old paper, lost lines, restoring what was nearly forgotten, preserving what matters, honouring what once was. And in all of this, there is no performance, there is no pretending, no one to impress or to justify our joy to, no masks to hold. There is only “this”, us, as we were always meant to be. Unshrinked. Uncompromised. Unhidden. Meeting each other’s storms and saying: Yes, it’s you, always; with fireworks and cosmic alignment. The wildness is not punished here, but welcomed, where nothing is trimmed to fit, where love is not a saviour but a presence. It is where the storm is met, held, and finally rests without shrinking.