The Cost of Love

No one warns you about the quiet moments.

When a song plays, and it brings them back. When you reach for your phone, forgetting there’s no one to call. When you catch yourself smiling at a memory before the weight of absence settles in.

Grief doesn’t announce itself with grand gestures. It lingers in the spaces love once filled. It sneaks into conversations, into familiar places, into the person you’ve become because they were once there.

And yet, I wouldn’t trade it.

Because grief is the price you pay for love. And if I had to choose between this ache and never having known that love at all—

I’d choose the ache every time.