The Irony of Reckless Devotion

They say devotion is gentle. I don't think they've met the kind that forgets itself. Mine has always been reckless: the sort that remembers how you take your tea, the stories hidden between your pauses, the days your smile is only pretending. The kind that prays for someone without telling them. The kind that thanks God for a person who may never know how often their name has been carried into heaven. There is an irony to loving like this. The more carefully I hold you, the more carelessly I spend myself. I become fluent in your silences while forgetting the sound of my own. I celebrate your victories as though they were stitched into my own skin. Your grief knocks on my chest before it ever reaches yours. And somehow, I never called it sacrifice. I called it ordinary. Perhaps that is what reckless devotion does. It disguises itself as kindness. As patience. As understanding. As "I'm fine." As "Take your time. As "I'll wait." Until one quiet evening, you realise you've built someone else a home with the bricks of your own heart, and you've been standing outside all along. But even still if I had to choose again, I know this stubborn heart. It would still pause to admire the way light finds your face. It would still whisper prayers over your tomorrow. It would still hope life is softer with you than it has been. Not because loving you was easy. But because devotion, in all its truest beautiful foolishness, has never known how to be anything less than complete. That is the irony of reckless devotion. It wounds itself without resentment. It gives without keeping score. And even while bleeding, it looks at the hands that caused it and quietly hopes they never have to know what it feels like.