People think love is a memory.
That it lives in photographs, in dates, in the way a name feels familiar on your tongue. That if a person forgets you, the love must be gone too—cleanly erased, like chalk washed from stone.
But that isn't how it happened for us.
Because I learned something I didn't know I needed to learn:
the mind can lose a map, and still the body will find its way home.
I used to write in this diary when I couldn't say things out loud. When the sea was too loud in my head, and the fire in my chest felt like it might burn through my ribs. I wrote when Whitby felt like a safe hiding place and a cage at the same time—when I was trying to become someone who didn't flinch at footsteps behind her, or the sound of a raised voice, or the way a man's anger could fill a room like smoke.
I didn't start writing because I wanted to be a writer.
I started because I needed somewhere to put what I carried.
And then he arrived.
Michael Jensen: world-class chef, too controlled, too polite, too quiet for a man who could command a kitchen like a storm. Brown hair always slightly undone, like his hands were more important than his reflection. One eye the colour of fields after rain—green that promised growth. The other the colour of deep water—blue that held the weight of weather.
People looked at him and saw talent.
Power.
Prestige.
I looked at him and saw the way his shoulders never fully dropped. The way he watched the room like he didn't trust it to stay kind. The way he smiled like someone who'd learned early that approval was safer than need.
I didn't know then how much darkness he carried.
I only knew I felt calmer when he was near, like my nervous system recognised his before my heart did.
They say love should feel like fire.
For me, love first felt like warmth.
Like a place you can finally stop holding your breath.
I'm writing this now because the story people tell about us—the neat version—doesn't hold the truth. It doesn't show the slow way control tightens, the way shame grows roots, the way a person can be convinced they are the curse. It doesn't show the nights I sat behind the bar of my pub—Fields of Waves—pretending I was fine, while missing him like a phantom limb.
It doesn't show what it costs to protect someone you love from a world that wants to own them.
Or what it costs to survive the moment you almost lose them.
I'm not writing this to punish the past.
I'm writing it to keep the truth from being rewritten.
Because the worst thing that ever happened to us wasn't forgetting.
It was being made to believe that love was dangerous.
And the best thing that ever happened to us wasn't remembering.
It was choosing each other anyway.
If you're reading this, you already know how it ends.
But I want you to understand how it began.
Not with a grand gesture.
With a kitchen.
A sea.
A boy with two different eyes who had never been held gently enough.
And a gothic girl from a poor family who learned to build a home out of firelight and stubborn hope.
This is Her Faded Memories.
And if I tell it right, you'll see what I saw:
Even when the mind forgets, the body remembers love.
Poem — Before the First Wave
I loved you
before you knew you were safe.
Before the sea taught you its patience,
before the fire taught you to stay.
You walked into my life
like a quiet storm—
not loud enough to warn anyone,
strong enough to change the air.
One eye, green as fields after rain,
the other, blue as the part of the ocean
that keeps secrets for the drowned.
And I—
I was a girl made of night and survival,
black hair, sapphire gaze,
stitched together by silence
and the vow to never become my father's violence.
So when the world tried to turn you into a weapon,
I chose to be your shelter.
When your hands shook with what you carried,
I learned to hold them anyway.
This is not a fairy-tale.
This is a shoreline.
Where love is not a promise you say—
it's the place you return to
when you can't breathe anywhere else.
And I will tell it, wave by wave,
until the whole ocean knows:
You were never the curse.
You were the man
who stood between me and the dark—
and still, somehow,
let me be the one
who brought you home.