A Love That Lives Beyond Reality

Imagine a machine that lets me live the perfect life. No pain, No loss- just endless happiness. In it, I could see you again, I could hold your hand, I could hear your laughter, frozen in time, never fading. If I step inside, I never have to lose you again.

Would I stay there forever, frozen in that perfect dream?

But if I do.. is it still you?

If I want to plug in, I could relive every moment we had together. The way you smiled when I surprised you. The way your fingers traced small circles on my skin as we talked about nothing and everything. I could walk beside you, feeling your warmth against me, as if time had never stolen you away.

No more heartbreak. No more missing you. Just love, endless and untouched by the cruelty of reality. If I plug in, I never have to wake up to the emptiness of a world without you.

But if I stay- if I choose the real world- I keep the truth of what we were. I keep the weight of the love we built, the kind that wasn’t happiness, but something deeper. Something painful, beautiful, and irreplaceable.

The machine could give me a version of you. A shadow, a memory, an illusion that feels like love. But it would not be you. Not the way you trulu were- the way you laughed in the middle of a sentence, the way your eyes softened when you looked at me, the way your love was something wild and real.

If I choose reality, I choose the ache of losing you. But maybe, in that ache, I am keeping you alive in the only way that truly matters.

Love is more than happiness. It is loss. It is longing. It is the echo of your name in the quiet of my heart. And maybe that is why I could never plug in. Because if love is real, then so is grief. And if I refuse to feel the pain of losing you, I am also refusing to say-

I loved you.

And I always will.