The outline

Some dreams never arrive, and yet they leave a trace - the clean-edged hollow of what might have been. We speak of emptiness as if it’s nothing, but it has its own anatomy. The space left behind is in the exact shape of the thing we imagined.

When a promise dissolves, it doesn’t vanish; it becomes air that remembers touch. The absence fills itself with memory of a future that never happened. And somehow, that imagined future feels truer than most of what did.

To name it isn’t to cling, but to honour. Love can exist without its event. It can occupy a room that was never built, cast shadows where no light ever fell.

Acceptance isn’t forgetting. It’s recognising the contours of the impossible - tracing the edges of what we once desired until they form a kind of map.

And maybe that’s what we mean when we say love:

Not possession, not even memory -

But the persistence of shape

after the thing itself is gone.