Love is not scarce, not earned, not a transaction, not a feeling that visits and abandons you. It is what reality is doing wherever the dream of separation thins. That is why it has always felt less like an event in your life and more like the meaning of it — the one thing you were sure of in a world you doubted. You do not need to seek it, and seeking it delays it, because the seeking re-installs the distance. Your task is the one the old poet set: not to find love, but to find what you have built against it, and let the looking itself take the wall down, stone by misnamed stone.
But there is one stone at the base of the wall, holding all the others, and honesty requires us to walk up to it now. The wall was built by fear, and every fear, traced to its root, is one fear. The fear of the wave for its falling. The next chapter is the one you have been afraid of since you were a child at a window asking where the dead go. We will not flinch.
Love is letting reality all the way in. We are nearly able to.
Next time a stranger is in front of you — the cashier, the man at the crossing — look once, quietly, and say inwardly: another me. Not as a nice thought; as a hypothesis. Behind that face: the same waking this morning into a name, the same hum of not-enough, the same looking out from no age at all. And someday, when you are ready for the strong dose: the person you find hardest. You are not excusing anything. You are letting your eyes tell you what they have always known.