Love begins as recognition. We meet parts of someone across many people — a way of laughing in one, a kind of attention in another, a silence that fits — and we think we have found something. Sometimes we have. Sometimes we have only found a fragment.

I remember the moments he cherished, the ones I could not catch. I was not yet ready. He met me in places I had not arrived at. We diverged there, each of us still on the way — toward someone else.

Maybe relationships fall apart not from distance, but from timing. One of you is already there. The other is still on the way. You feel it before you can name it.

With the one you meet in time, you meet here, now. Drift happens. Days, hours, sometimes months. But you return to the same place.

And then there are those with whom you meet in nothing at all. There is no love there. There may be something else: the expectations of others, self-deception, the attempt to fill a shape that ached with whatever lay closest at hand. This can only lead to losing yourself.

When you meet in time, you complete each other. You amplify each other.

Love is constructive interference.