The Unchanged
Loves Memo-ry
There is a love that doesn't know how to receive the memo.
The one that says:
This is over now, adjust accordingly,
redistribute the feeling,
find somewhere new to send it.
It nods.
It understands the logistics of the thing.
And then it stays exactly where it was,
hands in its pockets,
not going anywhere,
not making demands,
just ‘there,’
the way a tree is there
whether or not anyone
is looking at it.
This is not the classic story.
The one where you loved someone
who never loved you back,
where the whole ache was one-directional
from the very start,
a letter sent to a house
where no one ever lived.
No.
This is another thing.
Perhaps a rarer and more disorienting thing.
This is:
We were in it together.
We moved through the same rooms at the same time,
skin finding skin like it recognized something,
like it was completing a sentence
it had always known the end of.
There was a “we.”
It was real.
I have the memories like photographs
that haven't yellowed,
which is part of the problem,
or maybe not a problem at all,
maybe just the fact of it,
the way facts don't care
whether you find them convenient.
We happened.
And then they moved
the way people move…
forward, inward, elsewhere,
into lives that have different shapes now,
shapes that don't include me
the way they once did.
And I understand that.
I genuinely do.
What I cannot do is unfeel it.
I have tried to explain this to the part of me that keeps
sending the compliance report,
The part that says:
Reciprocity has shifted, recalibrate accordingly.
I tell it: I know.
I tell it: I'm not waiting.
I'm not at a window watching the road.
I'm not writing letters no one reads,
not frozen in some amber of what used to be.
I'm here. I'm moving.
I'm open to the next and the new,
genuinely, not as a performance of healing,
not as a strategy to stop feeling this.
But the love,
the love for them,
it didn't get the memo either.
It's not pining exactly.
It's not grief exactly,
though it has grief's texture
on certain nights and during the days when I am driving alone.
It's more like…
it simply is.
A frequency still broadcasting
even after the station changed format.
Not waiting to be received.
Just transmitting, because that's what it does,
because that's what it is.
Two women I have loved
the way you love something
that rearranges your interior permanently.
Not violently, not against your will,
but the way light rearranges a room
just by being in it.
You can turn the light off.
The room doesn't go back to what it was before.
That's not a complaint.
I loved them well.
I loved them true.
I love them well,
I love them true.
I love them before time and till I die.
And whatever changed in them,
the softening of feeling,
the redirecting of desire,
the natural drift of two lives
that turned at different angles,
none of that invalidates the thing in me.
None of that makes the love
*wrong* or *stuck* or *confused*.
It is *loyal*,
which is not a weakness,
even when it sits beside you
in the quiet like a faithful animal
you didn't ask for
and couldn't send away
even if you tried.
The world wants a cleaner story.
It wants:
you loved, you lost,
you grieved appropriately,
you moved on,
you found someone new,
the old feeling faded,
as old feelings do.
And some of that is true.
The grief came. I moved.
I'm open, genuinely open,
to what hasn't arrived yet.
But the love for them,
it doesn’t fade.
And I've stopped expecting it to
on any schedule the world considers reasonable.
Time may soften it,
that feels right, that word, soften…
not erase it, not replace it,
just round its edges
the way water rounds stone,
slowly, without announcement,
the stone still entirely the stone,
just a little smoother
than before.
Or maybe not.
Maybe I carry this the whole way
this unchanged, unreturned,
once-mutual, now-asymmetric love,
the way you carry certain songs
that belong to certain people
and always will,
and you don't stop listening to music,
you don't grieve the songs,
you just know whose they are
and let them be.
Here is what I want to say to anyone who knows this:
You are not broken.
You are not weak.
You are not doing love wrong.
You loved someone all the way.
You loved them with the part of you that doesn't negotiate,
that doesn't check the market conditions
before committing,
that doesn't love toward a result.
You loved them because they were
themselves,
because of what their presence did to the air around you,
because of how your mind moved
differently when they were near,
because something in you recognized something in them
and said yes
before you even knew the question.
And that recognition doesn't un-happen
because circumstances changed.
It was real when it was mutual.
It is real now that it isn't.
The realness doesn't require their current participation.
I'm not closed to the next.
I want to say that again, for my self, for the truth and
clearly, without apology.
I'm not standing in a doorway facing backward.
I'm facing forward,
genuinely, with my whole body,
curious about what's coming,
capable of new feeling,
not using this love
as a shield or an excuse
or a reason not to show up
for whoever comes next.
But the love is still here.
Quietly. Permanently. Unchosen.
Not consuming. Not controlling.
Just present,
the way the ocean is present
whether you're looking at it or not,
whether you're thinking about it or not,
doing what it does
without asking your permission.
This is the kind of love that doesn't have good language yet.
Not exactly unrequited — it was requited in each unique way,
it was held and returned and real.
Not lost, it's right here.
Not grief — grief implies it's over.
Not hope — it's not waiting for anything.
Maybe just: love.
The plain noun.
The thing itself,
without the modifiers the world keeps trying to attach to it,
without the timeline the world keeps expecting it to follow.
Just: I loved them.
I love them still.
The way I loved them is exactly how I love them now,
no less, not different,
not dimmed by distance
or the years
or the fact that they've moved
into versions of their lives
that don't include me
the way they once did.
I love them the same.
I cannot change it.
Only time may soften it,
and even then
even then
the love will have been.
Which means it always will be.
Which, if you sit with it long enough,
if you stop fighting it
and just let it be
what it actually is,
is not a wound.
It's proof
that something real
happened here.
That I am capable
of the kind of love
that doesn't negotiate its own ending.
That they mattered.
That they still do.
There is a love that doesn't know
how to receive the memo.
And I have stopped
trying to send it.