why must loss be the catalyst for love's deepest arrival?

by Marissa Harris

5/10/2025

Because in the beginning,
there was everything.
And everything meant
nothing was missing.

No shape.
No longing.
No edge.
Just sameness.

But then—
a fracture,
a folding,
a first goodbye stitched into the fabric of matter.

And then.
And then.
And then is when we realized:

Love cannot continue
unless we choose it—
again,
and again,
and again.

We cannot resurrect
what we did not know
we were already losing.

This is the place where
never agains
begin to take shape.

Not just as grief,
but as form.

As memory pressed into skin.
As quiet chair corners.
As someone’s favorite song you never skip anymore.

This is where the hollow opens—
and we are remade inside it.

Because the cost
of having
is always
the risk
of losing.

But then—
a rupture.
The birth of time.
The split of matter from antimatter.
The great cosmic “No” that gave us the “Yes.”

And from that moment forward,
everything that lives
must know the ache
of something that doesn't.

Grief is the echo of existence.
It’s how the universe teaches us where we end
and where love keeps going.

We do not evolve in comfort.
We evolve in the vacuum.
In the longing.
In the vast reach toward what is no longer
(or never was
but we imagined anyway.)

It is not that we grow because of pain.
But because pain proves
we had something worth losing.

Grief is not the absence of love—
it is love, compressed
into a denser element.
A neutron star of affection,
so heavy,
it bends time.

We are not here to avoid grief.
We are here
because grief made us.
Because stardust collapsed.
And something still bloomed.

So yes.
Life requires grief.
Because without it,
there is no depth,
no gravity,
no edge to push against
when we become.

And still/
we say yes.
Still/
we love.
Still/
we remember.

And still/
we orbit what’s gone,

naming it love.