Love’s Force

Love is not a feeling I have had.
It is a debt I have paid,
and others have paid on my behalf.

Sometimes the payment looked noble:
becoming the silence inside someone else’s chaos.

Sometimes it was driving miles out of my way after an overnight shift just to leave a Blueberry Pepsi and a mocha latte on a porch with a note that said, Thinking of you. Have a good day at school.

Sometimes it was the heavy vigil of sitting in a car at night, watching over a house I was not allowed to approach,
knowing the people inside were mine to protect—
and that leaving was not an option.
And sometimes, love looked like failure.
The wreckage left behind when you pour your soul into an effort that collapses, wounding the very people you were trying to love and nurture.

We are taught that love is a sentiment—
a soft, volatile thing that fluctuates with the weather of our moods.
This is a lie.

Feelings are weather.
Love is physics.
It is gravity.

I learned this in the silence of a hospital room,
my body broken, when my daughters walked through the door.
Years of distance and mistakes evaporated— because the bond was a law of nature that time had no authority to repeal.

That gravity is a major reason I survived the crash.
But physics is indifferent to proximity.

I have a son I do not know.
He exists in a silence I cannot breach,
across a distance I cannot close.
Yet the force remains.
I hold space for him with the sheer mass of a father’s existence.

I stay heavy.
I stay here.
I keep the orbit open.
Love’s force extends beyond blood.
It pulls in the friends who stood watch when I was dissolving.
It binds me to strangers met through shared work and travel—
the veterans we ride for,
the communities we live in,
the people who bend their backs to care for others and the earth we came from.

We do not always like each other.
We do not always agree.
But we are bound by the sweat that proves we belong to the same reality.

Love is not ease.
Love is the terrifying,
crushing calculation that you will remain a stable center even when the rest of the system goes dark.
It survives absence.
It survives restraint.
It survives the years that try to erode it.

But gravity comes with a cost.

You must carry the weight.
To love is to volunteer to be the ground others stand on.

If you walk away from this unchanged,
it will not be because you didn’t understand.
It will be because you chose not to bear the load required to keep your world intact.

The weight is yours now.