What if love isn’t something we receive, but something we remember?

So often, we reach for love with outstretched hands and aching hearts, imagining it as something we must earn, attract, or find in another. But what if love is not the prize waiting at the end of longing but the presence waiting to be uncovered in the longing itself?

This poem is a remembering. A returning. It invites us to pause our reaching and feel instead into the quiet current already moving through us the thread of love that is never absent, only sometimes unseen.

What if Love

is not the firework,
not the forever vow engraved in stone
but the quiet return
of breath to breath,
the hush between heartbeats that says,
I see you.

What if Love
is the tether between souls,
invisible yet undeniable
a thread we follow
from womb to world
and back to mystery again.

Between the portal of birth
and the threshold of death,
we walk inside skin and story,
learning the texture of Love
through touch, through loss,
through the ache of wanting
and the fear of losing.

And when that thread quivers,
when threat comes cloaked as silence
or distance or doubt,
we armor our longing,
build fences around tenderness,
forge conditions out of fear
to keep the garden from vanishing.

But maybe Love
never needed protection
only presence.
The soft yes of,
I’m here.
Not flawless. Not forever.
But here.

And maybe longing
isn’t something to escape
but something to meet,
to cradle like a child of the soul
asking for remembrance.

I used to think
Love was something I had to be given
seen, touched, wanted, held.
And I still long for those things.

But now I know
that when I sit in stillness
and open to the trembling silence,
something greater moves through me.

I awaken my own connection
to the flow of mystery
that unfolds as Love
embodied and expressed,
always present,
even when unseen,
waiting to be found
not out there,
but right here,
within.

Now I know:
I am never unloved
only sometimes unseeing.

And when I remember,
when I return to the breath,
the beat,
the body
I find Love again.

Not the kind that fixes or fills,
but the kind that stays.
The kind that says:
This moment matters.
This presence is holy.
This thread is unbroken.

So what if Love
was more than the longing
for connection?

What if Love
was presence
with the mystery,
with ourselves,
with another soul
on the road between the stars?