Of all the things that make a life, love and grief may be the most inseparable.

Seeing love as an experience of presence and grief as an experience of absence: one gives us another person, the other takes them away, I grow into thinking perhaps they are not opposites at all.

To love someone is to become vulnerable to their loss. To grieve is to remain bound to what mattered, even when it can no longer be possessed, touched, or returned to.

These books exfoliate the territory between having and losing, between meeting and parting, between the life we are living and the lives that disappear from it. The question what happens when we understand, sometimes from the very beginning, that a meeting is its own ending.

Love is found here not only in romance, but in attachment, longing, tenderness, desire, recognition, and the countless forms of human closeness that make us vulnerable to one another.

Grief, likewise, is not confined to death. We grieve people who are still alive, places we can no longer return to, versions of ourselves that have disappeared, futures that never arrived, and relationships whose endings remain unfinished. Every attachment carries the possibility of absence. Every bliss contains the knowledge that it cannot remain unchanged. Every person we allow into our lives alters the shape of what it will mean to lose.

Love and grief are therefore not two separate experiences, one beautiful and one painful. They are two movements of the same human capacity: the capacity to let something matter.

These are books about what it costs to love, what remains when love changes form, and why grief may be less the opposite of love than its most enduring expression.

You might feel lonely in feeling it all, but you are never alone. I am here, always.

Much love, Maia.

hearts. (EPUB)