Part I — Everyone Knows Love

The question arrives without warning.

A child at breakfast. A friend before a wedding. Someone you love in a hospital hallway. The moment is ordinary until it isn't. You reach for an answer and discover that the words you have borrowed from songs, stories, and old conversations no longer seem quite large enough.

You may have been there.

That gap is where we begin—not with a definition or a theory, but with something almost everyone recognizes and almost nobody can explain. Before we try to explain, we will learn to look.