TELL ME YOU SEE ME.

I wonder sometimes what he will be like.

Not in the way you daydream about a stranger — the hypothetical face, the hypothetical life. More like a quiet question I return to when I'm thinking about the future and what I want it to hold. Will he be a creative like me? A painter, a chef, someone who moves through the world feeling everything and then needing to make something out of it? Or will he be the other kind — the kind who lives in logic and systems and plans. A scientist. An engineer. Someone who finds beauty in precision the way I find it in light.

I think about this more than I probably should.

I find myself smiling at the thought of connecting with someone over our passions. And I wonder what he pours himself into. What exhausts him in the way that only the things you love can.

I want to believe it could work either way. Most days, I do. Two people from different worlds can build something beautiful if they respect what the other is doing and show up for it fully. But there's a quieter, more stubborn part of me that isn't so sure. And I think that uncertainty is worth following.

What I wonder about is something quieter than that. Something I'm not sure I even have the right words for yet.

It's not whether he will love me. It's whether he will know me. Whether he will want to. Whether loving me will make him curious about the interior of who I am — not just the finished things I make, not just the photographs he can see or the essays he can read — but the person underneath all of it. The one who made them.

There is a difference between being supported and being witnessed. I know this now.

I have a specific fear about this. Two of them, actually.

The first is the umbrella problem.

I'm a photographer. And when I tell someone that, I watch something settle in their eyes — like a door closing quietly, politely. Oh, she takes photos. Filed away. Understood. Done.

But I am not newborn photography. I am not sports, or automotive, or corporate headshots in a beige conference room. The word photographer doesn't begin to describe what I actually do or why I do it — the way I'm looking for my favorite light at golden hour, a moment of stillness inside motion, a dreamlike quality in a face or a street or a landscape that most people walk past without seeing. That's not a category. That's a way of moving through the world.

And it doesn't stop there. My creativity doesn't live in one room. It lives in my hands when I'm in the kitchen all day, trying a new flavor combination for no reason other than that it occurred to me. It lives in the cinematic memories that find their way to the surface when I sit down to write.

To hand me a label and stop there is to not have looked at all.

The second fear is subtler. And if I'm being honest, it's the one that lingers more than the first.

It's the fear of someone who receives the finished thing but never wanted to be let into the making of it. Who stands in front of a photograph I took and says this is beautiful — and means it, genuinely — but has no curiosity about what I was thinking when I pressed the shutter. What I almost didn't capture. The work of curating and framing beauty from a scene surrounded by everything that didn't matter. What I felt when I saw it come through in editing and knew I'd gotten it.

The stream of consciousness thoughts mid-creation. The why behind a choice. The feelings about a piece before anyone else has seen it. What I want to do with it after. All the small alive things that happen between the idea and the finished work. The tiny sparks of inspiration that I add to a piece that make it distinctly, undeniably mine.

I don't need someone who creates the way I do. I've let go of that requirement.

But I need someone who is curious about how I do. Someone who understands that when I share a piece of work, I'm not just showing them the thing. I'm opening a door. And I'm quietly hoping they'll want to walk through it.

I didn't have to go looking very far to find proof that this kind of love exists.

She has been there all along.

Every time I finish an essay — which lately has been almost every day — the ritual is the same. Evening. My mom’s room. We sit together on the bed and I open my laptop and hand it to her. And then I watch her read.

Her face does everything. A slow smile at a line she loves. An audible hmm when something makes her think. An awww that escapes before she can help it. And sometimes, depending on the piece, tears. Quiet ones. The kind that mean something landed exactly where it was supposed to.

When she finishes, she doesn't rush. If the essay moved her deeply she'll sit with it for a moment first, letting it settle. And then she'll speak — not just to say this is beautiful, though she says that too. She asks about my process, the real experiences behind the words, how I felt writing a particular scene, where the idea came from. She goes back through the essay and points out specific lines that moved her. This one. I like how you phrased this one.

She has told me I should be a writer more times than I can count. She does this thing where she imagines a future version of me, a little conversation she has with herself out loud: so what do you do? I'm a writer! And she smiles so wide when she says it because she already believes it. She has always believed it, maybe before I fully did.

She is more than a supporter. When the world's doubts get loud — and they still do, some days — her words are the thing that make them fade. She makes me feel like a creative life isn't just possible for me. It's my destiny.

What she does is witness. She reads every word like it matters — because to her, it does. She doesn't just receive the finished thing. She wants to know how I got there. She follows me all the way into the making of it and looks around.

I grew up being seen this way. I just didn't have a name for it yet. And now that I do, I know exactly what I’m asking for.

And then, not long ago, someone showed me what it looked like outside of her.

We had strolled around downtown after dinner — pizza, which made gelato a necessity rather than a choice. The atmosphere was warm and loud and alive, a live band performing in front of a nearby restaurant. The kind of music that reminds you it’s Saturday night and you should be celebrating. But we wandered off the main street and found the ice cream shop tucked away down a quieter block. When we stepped outside with our scoops and settled at a table, the energy shifted. Softer. Just us, and the colored lights of the restaurants already glowing in the early dark of twilight, and the faint music carrying over from the street we had left behind.

The night before, I had brought him to a family dinner. He had tried the cookies I baked and loved them — told me so sincerely, more than once, in the way people do when they really mean it and need you to know that they do. You're so talented. You could really have your own business. Your desserts are so unique. Each one landing like he was placing it carefully, making sure it stuck.

I said thank you after each one. I always say thank you a lot.

And then, sitting across from me at that small table on that quiet street, he asked me a question that I wasn't expecting.

What would it be like to have your own bakery?

Not just that. He wanted to know what I would name it. Where in the world I would put it — a big city, a neighborhood side street, somewhere else entirely. What would be on the menu.

I paused. I let the meaning of what he was asking wash over me for a moment.

He wasn't making conversation. He was knocking at the door of my creative mind and asking to be let in.

I should say — a bakery isn't really a dream I need to come true anymore. I bake for myself, for the people I love, for the quiet joy of it. But he didn't know that, and it didn't matter. He wasn't asking me to make a plan. He was asking me to dream out loud. And there is something about being invited to do that — to explore a fanciful thought as if it were real, just because someone wanted to hear you be fully yourself — that feels like its own kind of gift.

I looked at his face while the question was still settling in me. He was leaning in, his eyes moving around my face, patient and unhurried. Not waiting for me to hurry up. Not waiting at all, really — he seemed almost preoccupied with looking at me, like the answer was almost beside the point. And this moment, me sitting across from him in the soft light while my thoughts gathered themselves, was already enough.

I felt warmth rise in my cheeks. A grin pulling at the corners of my mouth that wanted to become something bigger. My hands found my ice cream cup, fidgeting, giving themselves something to do. Because I knew what was happening. A small spotlight had found me in that quiet tucked-away street, and he was the one holding it, and he was simply waiting for me to step into it.

So I did. I told him everything. My bakery would be a standalone shop on a street with a cozy, local vibe in a neighborhood like Noe Valley in San Francisco. My matcha raspberry pistachio chocolate chunk cookies would be on the menu, and my ube cinnamon rolls. And I’d name it Colibrí — a combination of my family’s nickname for me and the Spanish word for hummingbird, my spirit animal.

He listened to every word.

This was a man who lived in logic and science and systems and plans. And he was the one who walked all the way into my world and looked around. Who asked not just what I made, but what I dreamed of making. Who created a space so warm and so specific that I forgot, for a moment, to wonder whether someone like him could ever really understand someone like me.

He already was.

I don't ask myself that question the same way anymore.

Will he understand me? Will he be curious enough? Will he know how to know me?

I used to hold those questions with a kind of low hum of worry underneath them. Like they were problems I hadn't solved yet. Like the answer depended on luck, or fate, or finding exactly the right kind of person.

But I know something now that I didn't before.

I know what it feels like when someone walks all the way into your world and looks around. I know the warmth that rises in your cheeks when you realize you are being seen — not just appreciated, not just admired, but truly, specifically seen. I know what it feels like to have someone knock on the door of your creative mind and wait, patiently, for you to let them in.

My mother has been doing it my whole life. She just never needed to announce it.

And on a quiet street at twilight, over gelato and a question I wasn't expecting, someone else did it too. Briefly. Beautifully. Enough.

That's all I needed. Not a forever. Just a proof of concept. Just enough to know that it's real, that it exists, that it's possible — and that I would recognize it anywhere.

I am not searching blindly anymore. I know exactly what I'm looking for.

And I won't mistake anything less for it.