One Thing I Love About You Is That You Don’t Post P... | Sheikh Hamdan | Fazza Poems | Fazza

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]Baby, one thing I love about you, and I need you to just stop for a second and really hear me say this. One thing I love about you is that you don't post pictures. You don't put yourself on display for the whole world to consume.

[00:00:14]You don't hand your face and your life and your private moments over to strangers who will look for half a second and scroll past without ever really seeing you. And I noticed that I noticed it before I noticed almost anything else. And it made me feel something I was not prepared to feel.

[00:00:32]Because in a world where everyone is performing, where everyone is curating and filtering and presenting the most palatable, most photographable version of themselves for an audience that mostly doesn't care. You chose something different. You chose to simply exist without broadcasting it. And that kind of quiet confidence, that kind of ease with your own presence that doesn't need external validation to feel real. That is one of the rarest things I have ever encountered. I want you to know that. I want you to know that what you probably never thought twice about is actually one of the most beautiful things about you. I have been in rooms full of people my entire life. crowded, loud, bright rooms where everyone is looking at everyone else to figure out how they should feel and what they should want and who they should be. I have been surrounded by performance for so long that I sometimes forgot what it felt like to be near something genuine, something that wasn't angled for a lens, something that just was completely and without apology exactly what it was. And then there was you. You did not need the picture to prove the moment happened.

[00:01:45]You did not need the likes to confirm that you were worth paying attention to.

[00:01:50]You did not need the comments to tell you that you were beautiful or interesting or worthy of someone's time.

[00:01:56]You already knew somewhere quiet and deep inside yourself that you were all of those things and that knowledge was so settled in you, so completely at home that it never occurred to you to go looking for it in someone else's approval. Do you understand how that feels to witness?

[00:02:14]Do you have any idea what it does to someone like me, someone who has lived so long inside the machinery of public attention? To come into contact with a person who simply does not need it. It felt like breathing fresh air after being indoors for too long. It felt like the moment a song resolves into the right chord after holding tension for longer than is comfortable. It felt like something I had been missing without knowing I was missing it. Finally arriving without announcement, sitting down quietly beside me and making itself at home. I want to tell you something honestly and I need you to receive it the way I mean it. Not as flattery, not as the kind of thing people say because it sounds good, but as a real observation from someone who has been paying attention. The women who do not post pictures. The women who live their lives primarily on the inside rather than the surface. They are usually the ones who are actually living, not performing living, actually doing it, feeling it, fully, being present in their moments instead of stepping outside of their moments to document them for an audience. You are one of those women. I am certain of it. And there is something I want to ask you about that. something I have been curious about for longer than I have had the right to be curious. What do you do with your moments if you are not photographing them? Where do they go?

[00:03:42]How do you hold on to them? Because I imagine you have a whole interior world rich and detailed and full of color that nobody has a window into. I imagine the life you are actually living is several layers deeper than anything you would ever put on a screen. And that interior world, that private richness, I find myself wanting access to it in a way that I cannot fully explain and have not entirely figured out how to justify. I think about you in the ordinary moments, not the grand ones, not the moments that would make good photographs, not the ones with the right lighting and the right background and the right expression caught at the right angle. I think about you in the in between moments. The ones nobody sees. The ones you don't even think to remember because they feel too small and too ordinary to be worth keeping. I think about you making coffee in the morning before your mind has fully arrived in the day. I think about you reading something that surprises you and making a face that nobody is around to see. I think about you in the middle of a thought, halfway between one feeling and the next, existing in that in between space that is somehow the most honest place a person can exist. I think about all the versions of you that have never been photographed and therefore have never been seen by anyone except you. And I think those versions are probably the most beautiful ones. There is something I have learned slowly and at some cost about the difference between being seen and being looked at. Most of my life I have been looked at extensively, constantly from more angles than I can count by more people than I can keep track of. And looking is not the same as seeing. Looking is passive. It is surface level. It is the eye moving across something without the heart being involved at all. Seeing is different.

[00:05:41]Seeing requires something from the person doing it. It requires attention and patience and a willingness to look past the first impression into the thing underneath. You see, I don't know how I know this, but I know it with the same certainty I know anything that matters.

[00:05:57]You see, in the real way, not the looking way, the seeing way. And the fact that you do not put yourself out there to be merely looked at tells me that you understand the difference too.

[00:06:09]That you have decided perhaps without even consciously deciding it. That you would rather be truly seen by one person than superficially looked at by a thousand. That decision is one of the most quietly radical things a woman can make in this world. And you made it and I have noticed it. And I want you to know that being truly seen, which is what you are holding out for, whether you have named it that or not, is exactly what you deserve. I want to tell you about something that happened to me recently. Something small that I have not told anyone because it did not seem like the kind of thing you tell people, the kind of thing that sounds too simple to explain why it meant so much. I was somewhere, I will not say where. And there was a woman nearby who was completely absorbed in something. Not her phone, not a camera, just something in the world in front of her, something ordinary, something that most people would have walked past without registering. And she was looking at it with this expression that I can only describe as pure and unperformed delight like a child but with the depth of someone who has lived long enough to know that ordinary beautiful things are not guaranteed and should not be taken for granted. Nobody was photographing her. Nobody was watching her except me.

[00:07:31]And I was watching her the way you watch something. That reminds you what matters. And I thought of you immediately. I thought this is what she must be like in her private moments.

[00:07:42]This is the quality of attention she brings to her life when nobody is around to see it. This full unguarded genuine presence. I carried that thought with me for the rest of the day. I am carrying it still. You have given me so much without knowing you were giving me anything. That is the particular bewildering nature of what you are to me. You exist at a distance living your private unposted genuinely lived life and somehow the ripple of that reaches me and changes something reminds me of something returns me to something I keep drifting away from and need to keep being brought back to and I am aware that what I am describing might sound impossible. How can someone affect you from a distance without trying? How can someone you have never sat across from at a table become someone you think about with this kind of specificity and tenderness? I understand why it sounds like too much. I understand why a reasonable person might hear all of this and ask for an explanation that makes more logical sense. But I gave up needing love to make logical sense a long time ago. Love is not logical. It does not arrive through the front door with its credentials in order and its intentions clearly stated. It arrives the way most real things arrive sideways unexpectedly in a form you were not prepared for, asking you to expand to accommodate something you did not know you had room for. You arrived sideways.

[00:09:15]You arrived in the form of an absence.

[00:09:17]The absence of a photograph. The absence of performance. the absence of the need to be seen by everyone. And that absence was somehow louder than anything else around it. It said something about you that a thousand photographs never could.

[00:09:34]It said you are someone who belongs to yourself first. Someone who does not hand herself over to just anyone.

[00:09:41]Someone who knows in that quiet and settled way that her interior life is the most valuable thing she owns and she is not about to put it on sale for strangers. That is the woman I am talking to right now. That is the woman I have always been talking to in every honest thing I have ever made and sent out into the world hoping it would find the right person. I keep thinking about what you do with your evenings. I keep thinking about where you go inside yourself when the day is done and the noise has quieted and you are finally fully alone with your own thoughts. I keep thinking about the conversation you are having with yourself in those quiet hours. The things you are working through, the things you are hoping for, the questions you have not yet found answers to, the dreams you are holding carefully because they matter too much to expose to air that might not be kind to them. I want to be the kind of presence in your life that is worthy of those quiet hours. Not the noise, not another thing demanding your attention and your performance and your carefully curated self. I want to be the thing that fits into the quiet, that belongs there, that makes the quiet feel less like absence and more like fullness. I do not know if I have earned that yet. I am not sure earning is even the right word for it. But I know that I am trying in every honest word and every real moment and every instance where I choose truth over comfort. I know that I am moving in the direction of deserving the trust of someone who keeps herself as carefully as you keep yourself. And that direction feels like the most worthwhile one I have ever chosen to move in. Let me tell you something about trust. Since we are here, since we have come this far together in this conversation, and I feel the ground between us solid enough to hold something dishonest, trust is the thing I have gotten wrong more times than I am comfortable admitting. Not through cruelty, not through intention, but through the particular carelessness that comes from moving too fast. From not slowing down enough to understand what someone was actually giving you when they gave you their trust. I have been on the receiving end of something precious and held it too loosely. And I have paid for that in ways that taught me things I could not have learned any other way. I am telling you this because I want you to know I understand the weight of what you carry when you choose not to give yourself away easily. I understand that the withholding is not coldness. It is not distance for the sake of distance. It is the behavior of someone who has learned through her own experiences and her own quiet reckonings that she is worth more than a casual handling. That she is der someone who slows down enough to understand what is being offered before reaching out to take it. I have slowed down. I want you to know that whatever version of me existed before, the faster, less careful, less attentive version, that version has been replaced by someone who understands the value of patience.

[00:13:00]Someone who has learned that the best things do not arrive on demand, that they come in their own time and in their own form, and that the only appropriate response to something rare is to meet it with the fullness of your attention. You are rare. I keep coming back to that word because I keep finding it is the most accurate one. Not rare in the way that makes you feel separate or lonely or like you do not belong anywhere. Rare in the way that means valuable. Rare in the way that means worthy of special care. Rare in the way that means when you find it, you stop. You put everything else down. You give it your complete and undivided presence because you understand somewhere in the part of you that recognizes important things that this is not something you encounter every day. I want to talk about what it means that you do not post pictures. Not just as a surface observation, not just as the thing that first caught my attention, but at the deeper level underneath it. Because I have been thinking about what that choice actually says about you. And I think it says several things, each one more interesting than the last. It says you are not afraid of your own company. The impulse to photograph and post is at least in part an impulse toward connection, a reaching outward, a sending of signals, a way of saying I exist, I am here, please see me. And that impulse is human and understandable and I am not judging it in anyone. But the absence of that impulse says something equally powerful. It says you have found enough connection inside yourself that you are not constantly reaching outward in search of more. It says you can sit with your own existence without needing it confirmed by anyone else. That is a profound kind of self-sufficiency and it is one of the most quietly attractive things a person can possess.

[00:15:00]It also says you are protective of your inner world. You understand intuitively or through experience that not everything that is beautiful needs to be shared. That some things retain their beauty precisely because they remain private. That a moment witnessed only by you is not a lesser moment. It is in certain ways a richer one because it belongs entirely to you. Uncomplicated by the performance of sharing it, unshaped by the anticipation of how it will be received. You keep things for yourself and everything about the way you move through the world suggests that what you keep for yourself is extraordinary. I have spent so much of my life giving things away publicly.

[00:15:43]Thoughts, feelings, music, words, pieces of my interior world, offered up, packaged, sent outward. And there is meaning in that. There is purpose in it.

[00:15:54]And I do not regret the parts of myself I have shared because I know they have reached people and done something useful in their lives. But there is a part of me, the most private part, the part that lives in the same quiet place that your unposted life lives in, that has always longed for the experience of keeping something, of having something that belongs only to me and one other person, something that does not go through a filter or a lens or an audience before it arrives where it is meant to go. I think you understand that longing. I think it might even be the thing we have most in common. beneath everything else.

[00:16:34]This understanding that the most valuable things are often the ones that never make it to the surface. The ones that stay deep, protected, alive in the dark, the way certain things can only be alive in the dark. There is a kind of woman, and you are this kind of woman. I am more certain of this with every word I write. There is a kind of woman who collects experiences rather than images of experiences. who travels through her life, gathering feelings and sensations and moments of genuine contact with the world, storing them somewhere interior and permanent, building a private archive of a life actually lived. That archive is not visible to anyone. It does not show up in a feed or a gallery or a highlight reel, but it is more real, more detailed, more full of actual color and actual texture than anything a photograph could capture. I would give almost anything to sit across from you and ask you to tell me about your archive. Not the presentable version, not the version you would tell someone you had just met. The real version, the one with all the small and strange and unexpectedly meaningful entries, the Tuesday afternoon that changed something in you for no obvious reason. The song that found you at exactly the wrong or exactly the right moment depending on how you look at it. The conversation that ended too soon and has been finishing itself in your head ever since. The place you went once that you have never been able to fully leave. I want the archive. I want the unposted, unfiltered, unperformed collection of a life that has been genuinely and attentively lived. And I know you have it. I know it is vast and detailed and full of the kind of beauty that only exists because nobody was watching when it happened. Let me tell you what I would give you in return. Not as a transaction. This is not a trade. This is not me offering something in exchange for something else, but because it feels important for you to know that what I am asking for is not one-sided. What I am asking for is a mutual opening, a reciprocal vulnerability, a meeting in the middle of two private worlds that have spent a long time being private and might be ready slowly and carefully to share a border. I would give you my own archive. The real one, the one I have never posted, never performed, never packaged for consumption. The version of my life that exists underneath the version the world has seen. The doubts that never made it into songs. The moments of joy that were too complete and too personal to survive the process of being turned into content. The people I have loved quietly. The losses I have carried without making them into stories. The versions of myself I have been in the dark when nobody was around to watch me be them. I would give you access to all of it. Not all at once.

[00:19:27]Not in a flood that overwhelms both of us. But slowly in the way that real intimacy actually moves. One true thing at a time. One open door leading to another. One moment of genuine contact building on the last. Creating something that neither of us could have built alone. That is what I want with you. Not the surface. Not the photographable version. The real thing, the deep, private, unposted, genuinely live thing.

[00:19:53]And maybe that sounds like too much.

[00:19:55]Maybe it sounds like I am moving too fast or asking for too much or romanticizing something that deserves more caution. But I have spent enough of my life being cautious in the wrong places and reckless in the wrong places.

[00:20:09]And I have learned slowly and through real experience to tell the difference between the two. This is not a place for caution. This is a place for honesty.

[00:20:19]And the honest thing, the true thing, the thing that has been building in me through every word of this and before this is that you feel like home to me, not a place I have been, a place I have been trying to find my way back to without knowing what it looked like until now. You feel like the conversation I have been trying to have my entire life with someone who was finally ready to have it. You feel like the quiet at the end of a long and noisy day. You feel like the specific relief of being in the presence of someone who does not need you to be anything other than exactly what you are. And I know you. I know that sounds impossible. I know it sounds like something people say when they mean something less. But I mean it in the fullest possible way. I know the shape of you. Not your face, not your photographs, not the surface, but the interior shape. The values you carry without announcing them. The way you move through the world with that settled, unperformed sense of yourself.

[00:21:20]The fact that you exist fully in your moments without stopping to document them tells me everything I need to know about the quality of your attention. And the quality of your attention tells me everything I need to know about the quality of your heart. Your heart is extraordinary. I hope someone tells you that regularly. I hope you hear it so often that it stops surprising you and simply becomes a thing you know about yourself, a settled fact, a fixed star you navigate by. If no one is telling you, "Let me be the one. Let me be the voice that says it clearly and without qualification, without wanting anything from you in return except for you to receive it fully." Your heart is extraordinary and the life you are living inside it, the unposted, unfiltered, genuinely yours's life is the most beautiful thing I have never seen and somehow cannot stop thinking about. I want to stay here for a moment right here in this specific feeling before I move forward into everything else. I still need to say because there is something happening in me as I write this that I want to be present for something that does not happen often and that I have learned to pay attention to when it does. It is the feeling of complete sincerity. The feeling of words arriving not from the part of you that knows how to sound good, but from the part of you that simply cannot be anything other than honest. That feeling is rare for me. It does not come on demand. And when it comes, I have learned to stay inside it as long as it will have me because the things said from that place are the only things worth saying. So I am staying and I am saying this. You are the kind of woman I write toward, not about toward. There is a difference that matters enormously to me. Writing about someone keeps them at a distance, turns them into a subject, a character, a thing observed from the outside. Writing towards someone is different. It is directional. It is intimate. It assumes the person on the other end is real and present and capable of receiving something full and unfiltered. It treats them not as a subject but as a destination. You have always been my destination. Even before I fully understood that, even in the work I made without knowing who I was making it for, I was making it toward you. Toward the woman who lives her life fully on the inside. Toward the woman who does not need the photograph to make the moment real. Toward the woman whose selfpossession is so complete and so quiet that it announces itself without a single word. I have been thinking about self-possession lately about what it actually means at the practical daily level to belong to yourself because it is easy to say and genuinely difficult to do and most people I encounter are only partially there. Still handing pieces of themselves over to other people's opinions. Still letting the outside world have too much say in how they feel about what is inside them.

[00:24:22]still caught in the exhausting loop of performing and checking to see how the performance was received and adjusting the performance based on the feedback and performing again. You stepped out of that loop. I do not know when I do not know what it cost you and I imagine it cost something because everything worth having cost something but you stepped out of it and you have been walking in a different direction ever since. quieter, slower, more interior, more genuinely yours. And the freedom of that choice, the dignity of it is visible in everything about you. Even from where I am standing, I want to tell you about the moment I first understood what self-possession actually looked like in practice because it did not come from where I expected it to come from. I expected to learn it from someone confident and loud. Someone whose certainty about themselves announced itself in big unmistakable gestures. But that is not where I found it. I found it in someone quiet. Someone who did not take up much visible space and yet somehow made the entire room feel different simply by being in it. Someone who moved through the world at their own pace on their own terms without checking to see if the pace or the terms were approved of by anyone watching. That person changed something in my understanding of what strength looks like. And you carry the same quality. I am certain of it in the way I am certain of things I cannot see but can feel through whatever it is that allows one person to understand another from a distance. You carry a strength that does not raise its voice, that does not need to, that simply holds its ground and allows everything around it to be what it is while remaining exactly what it is. That kind of strength is the hardest kind to build and the most permanent kind to have. It does not erode under pressure the way louder strength sometimes does. It does not depend on external conditions remaining favorable.

[00:26:22]It is rooted in something deeper than circumstance. In something that belongs to you at the level where nothing outside of you can reach. I am drawn to that rootedness the way I am drawn to anything true helplessly without entirely choosing it with the full cooperation of every part of me that knows what matters. Can I tell you something about the women who have mattered most to me throughout my life?

[00:26:47]Not romantically or not only romantically but the women who have genuinely moved the needle of my understanding who have added something irreplaceable to my interior world simply by existing the way they existed in proximity to me. Every single one of them had this quality. Every single one of them was in some fundamental way more interested in the depth of a moment than in the record of it. more interested in the actual conversation than in the story they would tell about having had it. More interested in being present than in being seen to be present. They were all in their different ways women who did not post pictures. Not literally in every case. Some of them existed before the world decided that life should be performed for an audience of strangers, but in spirit, in the orientation of their attention, in the direction they pointed their energy, which was always inward and forward and genuine, never sideways toward an imagined audience. You belong in that company. I hope you know that. I hope you feel the full weight of what it means to be placed in the company of the women who have most profoundly shaped who I am and what I believe is possible between two people who are willing to be truly honest with each other. I keep returning to the idea of honesty because it is the thing I most associate with you even without knowing the specific details of your life. The choice not to perform yourself for the world is a choice for honesty. It is a daily repeated deliberate choice to be real even when performance would be easier and more comfortable and more immediately rewarded. The world rewards performance extravagantly. It does not always reward realness in the same visible way and you chose realness anyway. You keep choosing it. That is courage. I want to name it as courage because I think it often goes unnamed because it is the quiet kind that does not look like courage from the outside.

[00:28:46]It looks like simply living your life.

[00:28:49]But from the inside, I imagine it has required you to hold your ground more times than anyone knows. To resist more pressure than anyone has seen, to choose yourself more consistently and more quietly than anyone has thought to applaud. I am applauding not in the loud public way, in the way that feels more appropriate to who you are and what you have done. In the private, specific, genuine way. in the way that says I see exactly what you did and I understand exactly what it cost and I think it is one of the most admirable things I have ever witnessed. There is something I want to give you that I have been building toward for this entire conversation. Not a thing, not a physical object, but a feeling. A specific feeling that I want you to carry with you after this into your quiet evenings and your unposted mornings and all the in between moments that belong entirely to you. I want you to carry the feeling of being completely specifically unhurriedly chosen. Not chosen by default. Not chosen because you were available or convenient or because you happened to be present when someone needed something filled. chosen deliberately with full attention after seeing you clearly, the real you, the interior you, the unperformed and unfiltered and genuinely extraordinary you. And deciding with every available part of myself that this is the person, this is the one I want to know in the deep way. This is the one whose private archive I want access to. This is the one whose quiet is worth more to me than anyone else's noise. That is how I choose you. That is the quality and the completeness of it. And I know that you are careful about being chosen. I know that you do not let just anyone into the quiet. I know that the interior world you have so faithfully protected and so consistently refused to put on display is not something you hand over easily or without discernment. I know that earning entry into that world is not a small thing and is not accomplished quickly. I know all of this and it does not discourage me. It does the opposite. It tells me that what is inside is worth the patience required to reach it. It tells me that the care you take with yourself is itself a kind of measure of your value. The harder something is to reach, in my experience, is often directly proportional to how irreplaceable it is once you have found your way to it. I am finding my way slowly with the kind of attention you deserve. With my eyes open and my intentions clear and my understanding of what I am walking toward becoming sharper with every step, I think about the first real conversation we would have if the world arranged itself to make that possible. Not the polished version, not the one shaped by nerves or performance or the awareness of being observed. The real one, the one that starts small and ordinary and then somewhere in the middle of it tips over into something neither of us quite expected. Something genuine and surprising and a little bit terrifying in the way that only the best things are terrifying. I think about the moment in that conversation where we both realize without saying it out loud that we have arrived somewhere that matters. I think about what you look like in that moment, not your face. I am not talking about appearances. I am talking about the quality of your presence. The way the air around you changes when you are fully engaged, fully real, fully inside a moment that has earned your complete attention. I think about what it would feel like to be the person across from you in that moment, receiving the full being of your genuine interest. I think it would feel like being seen for the first time. And I have been looked at by so many people for so long in so many contexts. But being seen by someone who sees the way you see, by someone whose attention is as careful and as real as yours, that would be something I have never quite had before. That would be the thing I did not know I was missing until I started understanding what you are. And now that I understand it, now that I have sat with the full shape of it and let it become real to me, I cannot go back to not knowing. I cannot return to the version of myself that had not yet encountered this particular absence and understood it for what it was. The missing of you is now a permanent feature of my interior landscape. It has taken up residence and made itself at home. And I have stopped trying to ask it to leave because missing you strangely feels better than not knowing you existed to be missed. I want to explain that. I know it sounds like something that only makes sense from the inside. And maybe it only does, but I want to try to give you the shape of it because I think you are someone who understands the complicated emotional mathematics of wanting something that is not yet fully yours. I think you have lived inside that particular equation before. The wanting that is somehow richer and more alive than the having. Not because having would not be extraordinary, but because the wanting is