It does not always obey.
The love of a parent for a child does not require presence to remain real. It does not vanish when the child leaves the room, crosses an ocean, or disappears into silence. It persists—stubbornly, continuously—against a world that so often requires interaction to sustain reality.
And grief.
Grief is love with nowhere to go. Love whose object has been removed from the field of response.
It does not dissipate.
It lingers—stubbornly, precisely.
The heart goes on interacting with an absence so precise it acquires weight and shape. Grief becomes a kind of measurement that refuses to forget what it measured.
All the while, we believed love must be solid to be true. That it must hold, remain, endure.
Reality offers a faint, unfinished outline. We press, hoping to make it stay.
But love does not live there.
It becomes real only when something answers it.
A leap. A collision.
A moment—brief and undeniable—of being here.
And then—
the leap again.