Where Does Love Go When It Goes?

BrainsWay

Where Does Love Go When It Goes?

It does not vanish. That would violate conservation—

not of energy, not of mass, but of imprint.

As Shelley suggested, the cloud dissolves and is not lost,

it becomes weather elsewhere—

a redistribution of ache across atmosphere.

Auden was less patient: “Stop all the clocks,” he said,

as if time were a rude waiter refusing to close the check.

But clocks don’t stop. They redshift.

Love leaves like light from a receding galaxy—

not gone, just stretched thin,

its wavelength pulled toward the quieter end of the spectrum,

until what was once a bright declaration

arrives as background radiation,

a soft, persistent hiss in the instruments.

You can measure it, if you’re careful—

in the way you still set the table for two,

in the reflex to share a joke that now lands in vacuum,

in the ghost-limb itch of a hand no longer held.

There’s humor in it, if you’re unkind enough to look:

we build entire cosmologies around one unreliable star,

then act surprised when it evolves off the main sequence.

Still—nothing wasted.

Neurons that fired together once have already wired their quiet conspiracy.

The pathways remain, well-paved roads to a city no longer issuing permits.

So where does love go when it goes?

It goes diffuse.

It becomes field instead of particle,

less a thing you can point to than a condition you move through—

like gravity, like memory, like a melody from Sinatra

lingering in a room after the record lifts,

the last note hanging with unreasonable confidence

that someone, somewhere,

is still listening.

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For those over at The DVerse Poets Pub, I can tell you it is not with the lost socks or my car keys.

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©2026 Christopher Reilley 

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