The learning of loss

Love was never just about losing someone— not the sharp, immediate kind, not the vanishing act I grew up expecting.

It was the quiet agreement that I might lose pieces of who I once was: the version that flinched at soft voices, the one who mistook closeness for catastrophe, the one who rehearsed endings before beginnings could breathe.

Love is the acceptance of potential loss— not a threat, but a threshold.

The knowing that hurt might find its way in, that I might one day wake with an emptiness shaped like someone I trusted. But without love, what is hurt? Just another empty room echoing its own name.

Maybe this time, loss isn’t a warning. Maybe it’s a clearing.

Because some losses are mercies: the guilt that once lived in my bones, the old wounds I carried like heirlooms, the pain I kept polishing, the trauma that taught me to bow.

With the right love, those can be lost too— quietly, gently, like someone turning off a light I didn’t know was still on inside me.