This is Poem 6 of a poetry collection. The final count will be between eighteen and twenty-two poems, depending on which ones earn their place by the end. Each poem will be accompanied, two days after it drops, by the drafts that preceded it.
Some loves remain perpetually in transit, close enough to feel but too unresolved to hold, and the rituals we build around them are the most honest form of accounting available to us for an experience that resists every other kind of record. Most of what we are taught about love concerns its arrival and its ending. Very little concerns the long middle space where something real exists without a name, without reciprocity, and without the habitat that would make it legible to anyone else.
Sometimes I wonder if emotion requires an audience to be valid, whether a love that never fully lands still counts as something that happened. The answer I arrive at is that the depth of what you feel belongs to you regardless of whether the object of that feeling ever fully appears to receive it. In the absence of the real thing, the ritual is the real thing, quietly practiced, witnessed only by the person who built it, and no less true for that.
