Love as a Time Tax

On romantic attachment and the temporal cost of memory

I am still in love with him.
Romantically.
Without revision.

Not as a plan.
Not as a hope.
Not as a future I am arranging my life around.

But love persists
the way certain costs persist.

There is a levy on quiet mornings.
A surcharge on empty rooms.
Interest accrues in the pauses
between one thought and the next.

I do not go looking for him.
Memory operates through automatic withdrawal.

A smell in a hallway.
A sentence I almost text.
The particular light of late afternoon
that once indicated we would speak soon.

This is the unromantic reality of attachment.
This is the aspect no one prepares you for:
the persistence of cost
after access has ended.
It continues to invoice the present
even after the relationship has formally concluded.

I pay in minutes.
In attention.
In the incremental diversion of focus
from the life I am actively constructing.

I am not disputing the charge.
The attachment was real.
The investment occurred.

But I am learning to audit what remains.
To identify which memories
still claim standing.
To renegotiate the terms of what I allocate
to a past that no longer governs my present.

I am still in love with him.
And some days,
that love incurs a greater cost than others.

Some days, the withdrawal passes unnoticed.
Some days, I register the cost and proceed regardless.

This is not closure.
This is an ongoing accounting.

I am learning to live
with the balance.

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