It was not a meeting...
not in the way the world counts meetings,
with names exchanged
and futures quietly negotiated.
It was something that arrived already whole...
like a season that touches the skin once
and is understood forever.
Love does this...
it does not always ask to be lived,
it does not always require a body to continue in.
Sometimes it is only a crossing of currents,
two tides recognizing the same moon.
There are moments that do not belong to time.
They pass through it, yes...
they borrow its language, its brief permission...
but they are not kept by it.
You feel this when it happens:
how nothing is missing,
even as everything remains untouched.
A glance becomes a lifetime
that refuses to unfold.
A silence speaks with such completion
that speech would only diminish it.
And you understand, without bitterness,
without reaching...
that there are lives we are not meant to enter,
and yet we are allowed
to stand at their threshold
and feel the warmth from within.
In another life, we say...
but what we mean is not regret.
We mean:
this was real enough
to exist without becoming.
We mean:
the soul has already recognized what it needs to recognize.
We mean:
even unrealized, this will not fade.
Because love is not measured
by the length of its occupation in our days,
nor by the things it builds or leaves behind.
It is measured by its certainty...
by the way it arrives without question,
and leaves without absence.
There are loves that stay,
and we call them ours.
There are loves that pass through us once
and undo the idea of possession entirely.
And both are equal
in the only place that matters.
So we let it go...
not as something lost,
but as something completed.
Like a note struck once
that continues sounding
long after the instrument is silent.
Like a door we never opened
that remains, somehow,
a room we have already entered.
And somewhere...beyond the arithmetic of days...
it is still happening:
that look,
that recognition,
that quiet and impossible knowing.
Not elsewhere.
Not later.
Simply...without end.
For true love, even unexplored,
has no impermanence in it.