Love in absentia

A poem.

‘Le Baiser à la mère’ (Her Mother's Kiss). c. 1899. Eugène Carrière.

Love in absentia

is still love.

No one tells you this plainly enough.

They tell you grief is clean and brief,

a season passing through,

a prayer whispered at a graveside

before the world asks something new;

but there are losses without endings,

without coffins, dirt, or stone,

the kind that leaves a mother standing

in a crowded room alone.

Because absence is not silence.

It has footsteps. It has shape.

It lives inside the body

like a wound that won't fade with age.

It waits beside me in the grocery store,

in traffic lights at dusk,

in every sudden moment

when memory turns reflex more than trust.

I still see things I want to show you.

That instinct has not died.

A book you would have carried home,

a joke that would have made you cry

with laughter loud and breathless

the way you used to do;

and for one fractured second

I still reach instinctively for you.

Love does not become less real

because it has nowhere to land.

It still lives in folded laundry,

in muscle memory of hands,

in setting out too many plates,

in pausing at your favorite songs,

in the quiet recognition

that my heart still counts you where you belong.

People say that time is healing,

that distance softens grief,

but time has only taught me

love survives beyond relief.

It changes shape, perhaps, grows quieter,

less visible to view,

but it still blooms relentless

in everything I do.

And motherhood is stranger

than I ever understood,

because once you’ve loved a child completely

it alters every neighborhood

inside your soul forever.

Every hallway, every room

still echoes with the memory

of the lives that used to bloom.

I remember sleepy foreheads,

little socks across the floor,

one of you always asking questions,

one forever asking more

time before bed, one more story,

one more drink, one final song;

how impossible it seemed back then

that silence could grow this long.

Now years move like weather systems.

Cold fronts. Floods. Droughts. Rain.

Still I speak your names internally

like a litany against pain.

Still I love you without witness,

without audience or applause,

because real love does not vanish

simply because the world withdraws.

And if somewhere in your spirits

there remains a thread of me,

I hope it feels like warmth returning,

like standing near the sea;

I hope it feels like being known

without needing to explain,

like finding an unlocked doorway

after years out in the rain.

Love in absentia

is still love.

It is love with nowhere to rest,

love that survives on memory,

love that outlives its context,

love that continues reaching

even after being left.

And I have carried it carefully

through every silent year,

still setting a place for you

inside my heart,

still hoping someday

you will appear.

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