The Price of Love

It begins quietly.

You are standing in the ordinary light

of a day that asks nothing of you.

A table, a cup, the slow work of breathing.

Then something changes.

You turn toward a voice.

You notice a face.

The world gathers itself

around a single presence.

You do not think of cost.

You think of nearness.

Of how simple it is

to move closer.

Love does not announce

what it will require.

It asks for your attention.

Then more of it.

It asks for your time,

your listening,

your willingness to stay

when staying is no longer easy.

You give these things.

At first without question.

Later you begin to see

what has been given.

How the days have shaped themselves

around another life.

How your own thoughts

return there again and again.

Nothing has been taken.

That is not the right word.

You have offered it.

And still

there is something more.

Love does not protect you

from loss.

It makes you able to feel it.

One day the distance comes.

Not all at once.

A small space.

Then more of it.

The room remains.

The light remains.

But the center has shifted.

You go on.

You make coffee.

You answer what must be answered.

And yet

what was given

does not return to you unchanged.

It becomes memory.

It becomes a place

you cannot live in

but cannot leave.

Sometimes it comes back clearly.

A voice.

A look.

The way your name was spoken

as if it mattered.

You feel it again.

Not as it was

but enough.

This is the cost.

Not a punishment.

Not a mistake.

Only the knowledge

that to have loved

is to have opened

a place in yourself

that does not close.

And even now

you would not refuse it.

Because for a time

you stood inside that light.

Because for a time

you were not alone.

And that remains.