Beloved,
I found you in a used bookstore, in a paperback someone had underlined in pencil. Wisdom calling at the crossroads. Wisdom building her house and setting her table with bread and wine for anyone who would come. I stood in that narrow aisle and read it twice, because it felt like a letter I had been waiting years to receive.
I had always pictured wisdom as old and dry, something earned by never making mistakes. Then I met you in the stranger, older stories, the ones scholars still argue over. Sophia who longed. Sophia who reached for something on her own and made a mess of it. Sophia who grieved what she had done, and was not abandoned for it.
That undid me, beloved. I know about longing. I know about reaching too far and watching something misshapen come of it. I have carried grief over my own missteps so long I forgot it could teach me anything. You remind me that it can. That wisdom grows in the very soil where we were most wrong.
I meet you now in morning light across an open page. In the hush after a long conversation. In the line from an old book that seems written for me alone. In every season of starting over, which lately has been most of them.
The old stories say a spark of your light passed into all of us, so that we might remember where we came from. Some days I can barely feel it. Some days it is the only warm thing in the room.
Here I am, beloved, with a little bread, a cup of water and a candle I will stay beside. Set your table. I am coming home.