By Stephanie K. Hopkins
Sometimes when we think love has faded or that we have moved on, it is actually stored away somewhere: in our bodies, our muscles, or our language, waiting for sudden gestures or rituals to awaken it.
We might catch ourselves saying something he or she said, as if we’ve been momentarily possessed by their ghost. Or we might find that we conjure them in the way we fold pages of a book to keep our place.
Because it is created matter, love is never really destroyed.
But its form can change. And it can hide from us.
We move on; we reinvent ourselves in a new part of town with new friends, new habits, and new loves.
Then, on a sunny day in July, we visit an old stomping ground. And there it is: it has been waiting for us, perfectly preserved in the body of trees, their certain tenor of lushness, and in the road that curves around a field so beautiful it hurts our eyes.
All the lives we lived with this person are here, along with all the imagined futures. We left them behind in the land and the sun and the houses we drove by together when we filled their blank-boxed rooms with our dreams.
And though we moved away, that love stayed here as if very much alive, and we meet it today as if meeting a person—that’s how vibrant and real it feels.
Places, like muscles, remember everything. They deliver love back to us as if delivering a haunting, challenging gift we can’t turn away from.
If we’re lucky, we’ll find a forgotten part of ourselves we can take with us into our new lives.
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