"Where there is love, there is worry." My mom used to say this every time she worried about me, and I would wave it off, insisting it was unnecessary. Don't worry, Ma, I'm fine. I never understood it then. I think I finally do.
Love comes in many forms. We often picture it as grand gestures and warm embraces, but sometimes it shows up as something far less glamorous: a restless mind at midnight, a phone checked one too many times, a prayer whispered for someone who may never know it was said. Sometimes love looks exactly like worry.
I have always been good at telling myself what I can handle. I can live with complicated arrangements and unnamed things. I am not the jealous type. I carry no expectations, I know how to comfort myself, and I truly believed I could love someone from afar. Every bit of that was true. I had done the work and made peace with uncertainty, and for a long time, that peace held.
What I never prepared for was the silence that follows when someone you care about falls ill. You are left clueless and restless, with no way to be there and no easy access to them. You are not asking for more than what is given, yet the waiting is exhausting. You worry endlessly, and when you try to be angry about not being told, the worry overpowers it every time. Anger, it turns out, is often just fear in disguise. I think of my mom then, and how she must have felt every time I brushed her concern aside.
That is when distance shows its real cost. I have learned I can be absent from someone's joy and still be at peace. If they choose not to share their happiness, I won't demand it. Love, in its mature form, can clap quietly from the sidelines. But pain is a different country altogether. When someone I care about is hurting, everything in me wants to cross the border, to sit beside them, to bring something warm, to simply be present so they don't face it alone. And not being able to do that is the hardest part of loving from afar.
Maybe this is what love was always meant to teach us. It is easy to love people in their brightest moments. Love is revealed in how deeply we ache when we cannot ease another person's suffering. There is a difference between being content with distance and being unaffected by it, and I am learning that I can accept the shape of a love, with its limits and its uncertainty, but I cannot pretend I don't want to show up when someone is unwell.
In the end, love isn't measured by how well we manage without someone. It is measured by how fiercely we wish to be there. And on the days when we can't, all we can do is hold them in our thoughts, send our care across the silence, and hope they feel it.
So here is to you, Ma. I'm sorry for every time I said your worry was unnecessary. It never was. It was love, speaking in the only language it knew.
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