She sits and looks out the window.
Long before she learned to count years or choices, she learned how to lose. Being orphaned taught her that love could disappear without warning, that people could be present one day and gone the next, leaving silence where certainty should have been. There was no calculation that could have predicted it, no formula that explained why some people stayed and others did not.
So she made a promise to herself without realizing it was one. If she loved someone enough, they would stay. If she gave fully—without hesitation, without holding back—love would be strong enough to anchor people in place. Love, she believed, could outwork loss.
The glass reflects a version of her shaped by that belief. Outside, the world moves freely—cars pass, light shifts, people hurry somewhere important. Inside, she is still, measuring what remains.
She has learned to count things that were never meant to be numbered. Years since she last felt safe. Choices made out of fear of abandonment. The cost of needing people versus the risk of losing them. She adds devotion, subtracts self‑protection, divides her heart again and again, hoping the math will finally come out right.
No one ever taught her how to do this. Life simply handed her the calculator and assumed she would know.
When she became a parent, love arrived without conditions. It didn’t ask to be measured or justified. It was vast, instinctive, absolute. Loving her children felt like proof that she had been right all along—that love, when done completely, could not disappear.
And yet, they are gone now. Not erased, but absent from her daily life. Disappeared into distance, time, or choices beyond her reach. The calculator cannot find them. Dates fail her. Details blur. What she clings to is the feeling—the memory of loving so fully it felt like home. She wants to believe that love still exists somewhere, unchanged, even if presence does not.
Loss, she understands now, is not a single moment but a long education. It teaches you how absence reshapes everything it touches. It teaches you that love can be real and still not be remembered, that giving fully does not ensure being held in return.
Some days she wonders what the final total is supposed to mean. Is a good life measured by how much love you gave? By how much loss you survived? By continuing to love even when love offers no protection?
The screen never answers. It only waits.
She remembers a time when love wasn’t a strategy against abandonment, when moments were lived instead of tracked. Back then, time stretched. Now it compresses, efficient and unforgiving.
Outside the window, the light shifts again. She exhales and sets the calculator down, if only for a moment. There are things she cannot quantify: the ache that began in childhood, the courage it took to love anyway, the weight of memories carried alone.
She knows this truth now, and it does not soften with time: for some of us, the love we gave has little value to those who forget us. It does not make the love smaller or wasted. It only reveals how unevenly it was held. She lets that truth exist without trying to solve it.
Somewhere between the numbers, life is still happening. And even knowing all of this, she understands she would still choose to love the same way—because withholding it would have cost her more.
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