It was just a phone charger. That’s what I told myself. Nothing big.

It was just a phone charger. That’s what I told myself. Nothing big.

But when I walked into the bedroom that night, I saw my charger already plugged in on my side of the bed. My phone almost dead — and he’d noticed before I did. For years I brushed things like that off, told myself it wasn’t real effort. That’s the version of me that misses the point — that love doesn’t always look like grand gestures, it looks like a cord waiting when you’re too tired to think. But this time, I stopped. I looked at him reading quietly, and I said, ‘Hey… thank you for plugging in my charger. For thinking ahead when I didn’t. I noticed.’ He just glanced up, smiled for half a second, then went back to his book. But I felt it. The heaviness I’d been carrying about being unseen got lighter. I use an app called ‘quiet effort.’ It keeps me from overlooking the tiny things that mean the most.