The Body Doesn’t Know What to Do With Love It Can’t Touch

I don’t know how to explain that someone who isn’t here can sometimes feel closer to me than people I can touch.

Perhaps love can exist without presence.

It seeks it.

The body doesn’t know what to do with grand ideas about connection. It wants a hand. A voice in the same room. It wants an ordinary day it doesn’t have to remember because another one will follow. It wants something to happen between two people, not merely exist.

Distance does not make the body matter less. It only shows that love did not live in the body alone.

When someone is near, love has its ordinary days. Touch, habit, time together. Little misunderstandings. A boring afternoon. A look that stops an argument before either person has had to give in.

Without any of that, it is easy to call what remains a memory.

But memory looks backwards.

This doesn’t.

You don’t keep returning to old conversations. You don’t preserve every moment exactly as it was. There are days when you go about your life as usual. You work, talk, laugh at something that has nothing to do with him. You don’t stand still, waiting.

You know he exists.

Sometimes one perfectly ordinary thing is enough. Something you hear. The way someone says a word. Something he would notice too. You don’t think, I miss him. For a moment, you feel that he is there.

And when you speak again, you don’t have to find your way back to each other first. You don’t explain who you are now. The conversation carries on.

They say love is strongest in absence.

I don’t know whether it is.

I only know that distance did not turn him into an absence.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.