to miss someone this much is to admit: i was changed

the mysterious ways of love

i think of all the people i’ve met in my life who felt like recognitions, not introductions. people who arrived with that quiet familiarity, like the scent of something i loved as a child but hadn’t smelled in years. they didn’t come crashing into my world; they just appeared. as if life had been gently, patiently guiding us toward the same intersection all along. no fireworks. no fate-declaring fanfare. just presence. a weight in the air. and suddenly, nothing was casual anymore.

and yet, as quickly as they arrive, sometimes they have to go. not out of betrayal, not even out of choice, but out of life. out of logistics. out of timing. out of geography. and that’s what makes it hurt so much — because you can’t even be angry at them. they didn’t do anything wrong. they just existed too far from permanence. and still, they carved out a place in me where no one else had ever touched. and now i live with this echo. this memory that sometimes feels louder than the present.

but isn’t it something… that even in the absence, love continues? it stretches across cities, across time zones, across long days and empty arms. it shapeshifts. it shows up in songs, in smells, in dreams, in the way i say certain words now that sound more like them than me. it hurts, yes. but it also honors. because to miss someone this much is to admit: i was changed. i was met in a way that distance cannot undo. and maybe that’s what makes it real.

so when i ask myself — would i choose it again, knowing how much it would ache later? — my answer, somehow, is still yes. a thousand times yes. because some connections are worth the longing. not because longing itself is romantic, but because having known someone deeply can alter the shape of a life even when they are no longer standing inside it.

maybe that is one of the mysterious ways love works. not every person who changes us is meant to remain beside us forever. sometimes the evidence of the love is not permanence. sometimes it is the language you now speak differently, the song you can no longer hear without remembering, the softness you learned because someone once met you there.

and maybe that’s what love really is: not just the joy of holding someone, but the courage to keep honoring what was real even when you can’t hold it anymore. to understand that closeness can end without making the connection meaningless. that some people remain with us not as relationships we can return to, but as small alterations in who we became.

something lived in between the hours. something remembered when the world is still. something that does not ask to be recovered in order to have mattered.

to miss someone this much is to admit: i was changed.

and maybe that is enough.

with love from the stillroom,
cibelle