Look past the racing heart at what actually happens. For a while — weeks, months if you are lucky — the border around the small someone goes down. Their joy lands in you as your joy; their pain hurts you in your own chest; the accounting stops — you give without invoicing, and giving feels like receiving because the line between the two has failed. Fear thins. The future loosens its grip; an evening is suddenly enough, an entire world. And — here is the detail everyone reports and no one examines — everything brightens, not just the beloved. The streets are more vivid. Strangers seem dear. Food tastes like food again. You are kinder to people who have nothing to do with your romance. If love were a transaction between two specific persons, why is the whole world lit?

Because the beloved was the occasion, not the cause. Their face was the place where your wall happened to fall, and what flooded through was not manufactured by them — it was what is always pressing against the wall: reality, undivided, which is another way of saying love. For a few weeks you were given, free of charge and without understanding it, the very seeing that sages sit decades for. The poets knew: lovers don’t finally create something; they finally stop something.

And then — you know this part — the dream reasserts itself. The small someone, having briefly drowned, surfaces and starts to swim. It begins to manage the love: to possess the occasion of it, to fear losing them, to keep score, to demand the feeling back on schedule. The wall rebuilds itself out of the very stones of the romance. And you say the love faded. But examine the corpse honestly: what faded was the wall’s absence. Love did not go anywhere; it is what is there when nothing blocks it. The dimming you mourned was the masonry returning. This is why the great spiritual claim and the great romantic disappointment are the same fact read in two directions. And it is why your love songs are full of accidental theology: every “you are my everything” is tat tvam asi with a backbeat, aimed one wave too narrow.