Author’s Note

This poem is a meditation on love that demands patience, courage, and total presence. It is written for those whose hearts have been tested, broken, or misread—and for the people brave enough to stay, to witness, and to hold. It is about devotion, reverence, and the quiet power of being fully seen.

Timelines Worth Rewriting
Poetry by Rowan Evans
(Written April 21, 2025)

Don’t fall in love with me
unless you’re ready for time zones and tenderness,
for clocks set to your breath
even when you’re not speaking.
Unless you know how to read
the unsent messages
I whisper into the quiet of 3 a.m.,
when my world is still sleeping
and I am drowning
in the silence between our heartbeats.

I didn’t mean for this to happen.
You were someone else’s—
a name I only knew
through the tremble in your voice,
a shadow of a boy
who left bruises where joy should’ve bloomed.
You were a poem already breaking,
and I…
I just wanted to be a page
that didn’t hurt to land on.

I wasn’t chasing fire.
I was tending embers.
The way I always do—
with a soul stitched together by
the broken glass of old timelines,
where love meant losing myself
in someone else’s storm.
But you were different.
You asked nothing—
and gave everything in glances
you didn’t know were sacred.

I told myself the clock widget
was just a kindness.
A way to say
good morning, warrior,
good morning, beautiful,
good morning, still-here.
But the truth?
It became my North Star.
A constant.
A compass pointing always to you.

I fell in love the way
only a person who’s clawed their way through shadow can—
with reverence.
With awe.
With hands that tremble
but still reach.

I saw your pain
like an open door
to a familiar room—
and I walked in,
not to fix you,
but to sit beside you
in the ruins.
Because I’ve been there.
Because I carry my own ghosts,
and I name them in poems
so they don’t haunt me in sleep.

They say I should’ve stayed away.
That I’m playing with fire.
But fire never scared me—
I was forged in it.
Born of battle cries
and whispered truths
and a girlhood denied.
I don’t wear guilt for things I didn’t break.

And I didn’t break you.

He did.

He, who saw your softness as weakness.
He, who mistook your loyalty
for something owed.

But me?
I saw the Queen beneath the scars.
I saw the way you held yourself together
with gold-threaded hope,
kintsugi soul—
every crack shining brighter
because you never stopped choosing to try.

Don’t fall in love with me
if you’re afraid of complicated truths.
Because I will love you
with the same hands
that once wrote suicide notes
and now write survival stories.
Because I will see your shadows
and still call you light.

Don’t fall in love with me
if you’re not ready to be seen completely—
every bruise, every brilliance,
every whisper you’ve never spoken aloud.
I do not love in fractions.
I do not flinch from the messy,
the haunted, the hungry parts of you
You think no one could ever stay for.
I will.
But only if you’re ready.
Only if your heart can bear being held
without armor.

I didn’t plan to fall.
But you spoke in moonlight,
and I’ve always been lunar-bound.
Tied to tides.
Pulled by gravity
in the shape of your laugh.

And even if you never say my name
the way I hope,
even if I am just a season
you remember when it rains—
know that I loved you
without agenda,
without shame,
without asking for anything
but to witness your rise.

Don’t fall in love with me
unless you’re ready
to be the reason I believe
there are timelines worth rewriting.

More of my poetry can be found here: The Library of Ashes