Lettera III. You don't get to choose love without choosing grief too.
Nobody tells you that when you let someone in, you're also making a kind of quiet agreement. Not with them—with something older, something you don't get to negotiate with. When you're choosing this, you're also choosing everything that comes after it.
I've been thinking about that a lot lately. How love doesn't just arrive and sit still. It moves through you, rearranges things, leaves fingerprints on the parts of you that you forgot were even there. And then sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once, it ends. Or the version of you that loved them that way ends. And what's left is grief, standing in the doorway like it's been waiting the whole time. That's the thing nobody really prepares you for. Grief isn't the opposite of love. It's what love becomes when it has nowhere left to go. All that feeling, still fully alive in you, still reaching and nothing there to receive it anymore. So it turns inward, and it aches.
I used to think grief was a sign that something had gone wrong. That if I had loved better, or held on differently, or let go at the right moment, I could have avoided it. Now I think grief is just the receipt. Proof of what was real. You don't mourn what didn't matter. You only grieve as deep as you loved.
And maybe that should be comforting. Maybe it is, a little. But mostly it just means that the bigger the love, the longer you sit with what it leaves behind. That's the deal. That's always been the deal. We just sign it without reading it, because we're too busy falling.
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