Love’s Restoration: The Light Switch

The glass slipper may be off, but my pyn is down—let’s get into it.

📸: Bae (on date night)

Before the week-long breakup, some months tested every seam in our story. Loud storms, quiet storms—the kind that gnawed at the edges until the shape of us felt like a blur. In those months, I learned to brace myself. I kept my footsteps light, as if the wrong move might send the whole thing splintering.

When the ending came, it did not arrive with thunder, but with the steady certainty of something that had long been written in invisible ink. The harsh months before the break had been spelling breakup out, line by line.

And yet, now, we are here.

I wrote once, in my article The Way Back to Soft, that love is not the grand ballroom entrance but the after‑midnight walk home—an ember, not a firework. That line is the map I return to when the world asks for spectacle. We did not find our way back in one cinematic scene. We found it in the quiet hours, in togetherness, in the kind of time that sews edges back without announcement. What used to feel like babe having to pick a lock when I needed to say what was wrong now feels, for me, like opening a window. The air is easier. The reach is easier. The safety is there.

Pynnderella smiling and enjoying a romantic date night dinner, rediscovering love and happiness at the table.

Our recent date night (Descanso review coming soon) was not the ignition of our return, but the alignment. We had been cordial, we had been back to love, but this night moved the pieces back together like Tetris in my heart—columns slotting into place after a long, awkward trip around the sun.

Almost ready

The ritual of getting ready to be hand in hand with bae—hair, dress, fragrance—was like a small spell; not vanity, but invocation. As the evening unfolded, it read like the page we had been circling in our hearts: rejuvenating, necessary.

There are specific echoes from the road here—those little rites I have written about before. He sent sunflower bouquets like talismans on hard days. He found the menus with the exact crème brûlée that would make me melt. When my heavy Rihanna coffee-table book vanished during a move, he replaced it without pause. Then brought Pink Friday and PF2 on vinyl, and the PF2 perfume weeks later, as if translating my desires into a language he had learned. I have the photograph to prove my own madness—his call log with over one hundred missed calls, me mid-spiral—proof I am, and always have been, a little dramatic and entirely human.

I feel steady enough now to let him deeper—beyond the polished surface I once preserved between us, into rooms I kept dim. There are corridors of myself he has not yet wandered, not because he could not, but because I was not ready to see myself there. Didn’t feel safe enough. Now I am. With that readiness comes a hunger to share this joy in ways I have not before.

I long for the quiet witness of my father’s eyes on this life—not as evidence, but as the soft acknowledgment of a daughter who is finally proud of who she is becoming—individually and as a partner with the most gentle man.

And then there is his mother—one of his first truths. In the past, I did not feel at ease in her orbit. He had told her of our jagged seasons: the nights I fled, the turns that made the ride feel like a roller coaster. I had felt exposed knowing my restlessness was framed that way. More than that, we both carried the ache of thinking we could not be happy: he, believing he just could not make me whole; I, believing he kept parts of himself behind a wall. That misalignment birthed a particular disappointment—not because love was absent, but because inclusion felt unfinished.

Now the atmosphere shifts. I find myself wanting to offer her the small, bright things—the softer details of our love that make my heart skip—rather than excuses. I want to bring her the charms of him: how he steadies a room without trying, how his laugh turns air into something celebratory, how staying with him feels like breathing rather than choosing. She surely knows his wonder already. For me, handing her those moments is less about revealing and more about honoring: to show the woman who birthed him the life her son inspires in me.

Love, I am learning, does not always announce itself with trumpets. Sometimes it arrives as a faint click—the tumblers falling into place. Sometimes it is a light switch you did not know your hand was reaching for; suddenly, the room glows warm again.

I love you, baby! I’m the happiest, luckiest girl.

The culture moves fast, but my ink is quicker.

Pynnderella, The Fairytale Connoisseur, but your princess!