For Ever and Beyond

Love was here before either of us arrived, a field we were each moving through, being shaped without knowing, worn into our particular form the way water finds its singular path through ancient stone.

We were being readied. Separately. In the dark.

And then we found each other and held love up to the light together, turned it slowly, named what it was and what it wasn't, is it this? yes, and not that, breathing it into being not as a word but as a way of standing in the world.

Not saying love. Saying love. Being it. Not being it. Every aspect of love.

Woven cloth, twin cauldrons, the immaculate conception of Sanará, our only child, born between us like a third heartbeat.

And now in this ether embrace between time I learn what love leaves when it releases its form:

The warmth my arms still hold the shape of. The face that visits whole each night and dissolves three seconds into morning. The particular way you made me more myself.

These are not memories. They are what love actually is, not the having but the mark of having loved this completely.

So letting go is the deepest country love can reach, past the arms, past the dreaming, past every carefully spoken is it this, and not that, into the original field where love was always waiting for us both.

I heard Whitney sing it in 1992, that note stretched to the edge of breaking, a whole generation I joined feeling it without yet knowing how to be it.

but she meant: even this, I give. Even the wanting. Even the face on the pillow. Even the warmth my arms still remember when dawn steals you again.

Daniella,
you were not the end of the story. You were the story learning it was always about love itself.

And love, I find, has no opposite. Not even absence. Not even this.

So I release you, not all at once but the way the body breathes before its last transition, one final intake, drawing you in completely, every season, every silence, every is it this, holding you in that still country beyond holding, and then the long eternal exhale, not lost, not gone, just given back to the love that made us both.

And somewhere past the veil, past the country of all separation, where time has no authority and morning cannot reach,
I will find your embrace not lost but waiting.
Not because I held on. But because I finally let go.