You have a strong relationship to things, my partner said to me in the most loving way.

I do.

I walk through a portal to home every time a butterfly flutters past. I fall in love with every river I meet. I find infinity in each dog I am honored to be seen by.

It makes life a ritual of breaking. For intimacy creates a space for heart break. Over and over again. Every place I leave beckons me to leave a piece of my heart. I am as much there as there is with me for the rest of my life. Sometimes it feels as if the universe took a match to the book of me and I am slowly dropping pieces of ash. A collection of molecules of both death and life.

Sometimes this makes it feel difficult to keep the fire burning. It has me wondering how it all can build me into a wildfire of love rather than a simmering grave of grief. Buried by love rather than grown by it.

I know there are answers. There's patterns and practices, too. But for now, I simply need to feel the shatter of life. A heart exploded like a firework, vitality surrendered in million pieces of light to memory and imagination. A continual longing bred by a scavenger hunt of the soul.

I am a mosaic of everything I have been and will be. And right now I am trying to find the path from seeing the separation of time as, well, separation, to it being a reflection of my own unique take on the web that connects everything to everything.

Is the burning and the breaking and the endless seeking of beloveds not the very thing I love about the universe? How love exists everywhere in a constant cycle of alchemy. So I ask myself, as so many have, is it true then that I, too, am a whole ocean in a drop?

I can hold it all, too, just like her.

Grief and love and the fear that tries to protect me from their endless loop.