Almost Still

 

Sometimes, when I’m walking home and the light hits just right, I think about how everything we touch eventually fades. Flowers wilt even when we water them. Songs end even if we hum them over and over. People leave, or we leave them. And yet, there’s this stubbornness in us that keeps loving anyway. Maybe that’s the real miracle, not the kind you read in holy books, but the human kind, the persistence to care even when the world insists on ending.

I’ve seen it in small ways. A friend still baking her grandmother’s bread recipe even though she never quite gets it right. We have a neighbor who's an old man. Every morning, he would sit on his porch, sipping coffee from a chipped mug, talking softly to no one. At first, I thought he was just muttering to himself. Then one morning, I heard him say, “Your orchids are blooming again.” His wife had passed five years before. He still tended to her plants every day. Love, I realized, doesn’t stop asking to be fed just because the other person is gone. It changes shape, but it doesn’t disappear. The way people keep the photos, the letters, the sweaters that still smell faintly like someone who isn’t here anymore. Love insists on existing, even in absence. Especially in absence.

We like to think love belongs to the living, but the truth is, it’s what keeps the dead alive. It remains in our gestures, in the recipes we repeat, in the songs we can’t bear to skip. It remains in the empty chair we still set at the table, in the birthdays we quietly count, in the photos we can’t move from the shelf, in the words we whisper to no one. It remains in the way we flinch at certain dates, in the familiar ache of ordinary days, in the weight of something we no longer have to carry but can’t put down.

It remains in the stories we retell until they fray, in the names we say just to hear them, in the echoes that follow us home. It remains in the spaces between our sentences, in the kindness we show to strangers, in the way we’ve learned to hold both love and absence in the same breath.

When Santiago waits for his lost wife in The Shadow of the Wind, when Orpheus turns back even though he knows he shouldn’t, when Marianne stands at the shore in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, they are all reaching toward the same impossible thing: a love that refuses to end, even when it must.

We like to pretend we’re rational creatures, but love makes us unreasonable in the most beautiful way. It makes us wait, it makes us hope, it makes us remember. I used to think grief was the opposite of love. Now I see it’s just love that has nowhere to go. It pools inside us, heavy and shining. It makes us do foolish, tender things, like keeping a shirt that no longer fits, or visiting a place that reminds us of someone we’ll never see again. It’s the ache that proves we’ve been touched by something larger than ourselves.

So when I think about my parents, I understand it a little better. Love isn’t only the laughter at the dinner table, or the warmth of a shared bed. It’s also the quiet that follows. The reaching across silence. 

Whenever we drive past the cemetery where my father lies, my mother always turns to look.

I think that’s what love is: everlasting. Deathless.