The world continues with its indifferent precision. The sun rises. People laugh. And you are stunned—not because you believed the world would stop, but because it did not acknowledge what had been removed.
What is left is to continue, against all odds, walking a path that was always meant for two feet, but now echoes with only one set of footfalls. You walk the old streets alone, repairing gaps with memory’s shaky thread. Every familiar corner becomes a small altar: the café where annoyance first flared and then folded into apology, the park bench where a ridiculous plan was half-born and then abandoned, the pharmacy where cheap reading glasses were tried on and posed in, the laughter too loud for the fluorescent aisles.
You talk, sometimes aloud, to the absent companion, as if they were only a step ahead and might turn back at the sound of their name.
And yet: you have been preparing for this, have you not?
Unevenly, without announcement—you rediscover a stir in you.
Not comfort. Not explanation. But persistence.
Snuggled in your heart like a thin spider thread—so delicate you hardly dare acknowledge it, so gossamer-fine it might dissolve under direct examination—there is hope. Unspoken, yes. Spoken aloud it might seem foolish, childish, a desperate bargaining with a universe that does not bargain. But held in silence, tended carefully in the private chapel of your longing, it persists.
The truth that has always been there for you to observe but you were inattentive. You see what you overlooked while it stood before you patiently: what was given and what you spent your days taking for granted.
The reckoning is clarity, not a punishment. You see the generosity of the ordinary: the morning coffee shared in silence, the hand reaching across the bed in the dark, the unremarkable miracles you walked past while waiting for something more dramatic to arrive.
That energy, as scientists remind us through equations and laws older than any one life, is conserved. It cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another. And if this is true of the measurable world—of heat, of light, of motion—then it is difficult not to wonder whether love might also obey a similar rule. Whether the particular flame that once sparked between you, the home you built inside one another, is not erased but altered, redistributed beyond the limits of what can be seen.
In prayer—if prayer is what we call words offered into a silence that does not answer directly—you find yourself turning toward that possibility. Not to argue for it, not to demand it, but to name the longing honestly. Let us meet again on the other end of the horizon, you think. At the place where the sky seems to touch the earth, where the curve of the world suggests there may be more than what is immediately visible. Let the rendezvous last longer than what was granted at these crossroads.
You imagine a HOME—not one made of walls, roofs, or addresses, but the Home you once assumed was your destination. The place where the journey was always leading, where the twisted route through ordinary mysteries might finally arrive.
Life, short by any measure, is not an insult to eternity, but its preparation. Judgment—whenever it comes—is not merely a verdict, but an unveiling. What will be measured is not how long you lived, but how attentively you inhabited what was entrusted to you. This understanding does not erase loss. It instructs it. The pain you carry is a proof that something real passed through your hands—something you did not fully know how to value while it was still within reach.
At times, the mind drifts further than belief allows. You imagine—without insisting, without claiming—that at the far edge of all this there might be a shared daydream of all who have loved and lost. That one day, beyond the narrowing of breath and hour, there might be a turning toward one another again. Not as certainty. Not as promise.
Perhaps the first thing said would be very simple: You came. Perhaps the second: This time, let us walk a little farther.
Only an image. A small allowance made by an aching heart, permitted to remain what it is: a human hope shaped by love.