"Don't hold onto all that."

Where do I put it down?

There are two kinds of love and I don’t think we talk about the second one enough.

The first is the one with an address. It lives in your apartment. It sleeps in your bed. It has a toothbrush in your bathroom, a side of the couch, and a preference for how the coffee is made. You can reach for it at 2 a.m. and find it there, warm and breathing and yours. This love is real. It is good. It is the love people build lives around, and it deserves every poem ever written about it.

But there’s another kind.

The kind that has nowhere to go. The kind that exists after the breakup, after the funeral, after the moment you realized it would never work. Not because the love was wrong but because the timing was, or the circumstances were, or life simply decided that two people who made complete sense on the inside would never make sense on the outside.

This love doesn’t get to do anything. It can’t call. It can’t show up with flowers. It can’t say the thing at the right moment or hold you when it matters or prove itself through any of the gestures we’ve been taught to recognize as devotion. It just sits there. In your chest. Taking up the same space it always did, paying rent to a landlord who can’t evict it.

And I think that love might be the louder one.

Not louder in volume. Louder in weight. Because when you love someone you’re with, the love has an outlet. It moves. It goes somewhere. You cook for them. You listen to them. You choose them every morning, and the choosing is the proof. The love has a job, and it clocks in daily.

But when you love someone no longer there, it just exists. Unemployed. Overqualified. Sitting in a room with no windows, doing the only thing it can do, which is to continue. That continuation is the part I can’t get over. The way love doesn’t ask whether it’s convenient. Doesn’t check whether the person is still yours. Doesn’t even require the other person to know it’s happening. You can love someone who has moved on. Who has married someone else. Who has died. Who has simply become someone you no longer speak to for reasons that made sense at the time and make less sense at 11 p.m. on a Thursday.