Sometimes we need to put something out there when it hits us. No arc, no adjoining articles… just an assortment of words that speak volumes. Enjoy.
They didn’t begin as a clean slate. Each carried lives already lived: mornings filled with obligations, evenings crowded by routines, entire histories stitched into the fabric of who they were. There were people they loved, duties they could not abandon, and paths that had been walked too far on to turn back.
So when their worlds brushed together, there was no fantasy of escape. No whispered wish that the past had been different, no rehearsed scenario of how it could have been. That kind of thinking was indulgent at best, destructive at worst. They both knew the danger of chasing ghosts.
Instead, they chose to live in the now.
What Is over What If.
What mattered was the conversation at hand, the laughter that came too easily, the silence that didn’t have to be filled. What mattered was the message read at the right time, the sounds that felt like a hand resting on your cheek. The present, sharp and alive, became their meeting ground.
He once asked her, “Do you ever wonder what it might have been like if we’d met sooner?”
Her reply was swift, not cruel but clear. “No. Because we didn’t. And here we are.”
It silenced him in the best way, the clean snap of a branch cutting through forest noise. She wasn’t interested in roads not taken. She was only interested in the road beneath their feet, and the way it could be walked together.
That moment shifted something in him. He realized how often his mind wandered into alternate timelines, into daydreams and regrets, into blueprints built out of vapor. She had no time for that. And slowly, neither did he.
They began to discover the fun of each day as its own.
When they spoke, they talked about what was happening now, what was being built moment to moment. If she described the way she walked the neighbourhood, he didn’t imagine some other place or time. He pictured that neighbourhood, exactly as she said it, and not with him there. If he told her about his fatigue, she didn’t try to fix it with theories about a different life. She simply stayed with him in the tiredness.
In a world that constantly pushes toward more, toward someday, toward elsewhere, they carved a small rebellion: this.
“What is” became not just a phrase but a practice.
It was the way her vocabulary changed when the subject turned tender.
It was the way his laugh grew fuller when she teased him without mercy.
There were temptations, of course. The mind’s reflex to wander, to imagine, to construct fragile castles of what if. But each time, they returned to the ground beneath them. Each time, they reminded each other: this is real. This is ours.
Their separate lives didn’t vanish. He still had his responsibilities, she still had hers. But when they stepped into each other’s orbit, those worlds receded. There was no demand for permanence, no blueprint for forever. They didn’t pretend they could solve time.
What they had instead was each other.
One night, as the conversation slipped into honesty, as was common, he said, “It’s strange. I used to think love was about imagining everything it could be. But with you, it feels like it’s about seeing exactly what it is.”
She smiled, though he couldn’t see it. He could hear it, though. The curve of it, the sparkle in the eyes. “That’s because imagining is easy. Living is harder. But living is worth it.”
They didn’t fall into the trap of thinking they had invented a new kind of love. They knew the world was full of people chasing possibilities and clutching regrets. They simply decided not to.
Their love was not an escape. It was not a hypothetical. It was not a dream deferred.
It was the message that came through. It was the quiet moment after between two breaths.
It was not what if.
It was what is.
A quietly luminous reflection on presence, intimacy, and the courage to live without illusion. Calder Quinn’s piece resonates deeply with the rhythms of real life, not the imagined or idealised, but the tender truth of shared moments. As someone who’s lived in Porto all my life, I’m reminded of the quiet beauty found in places like Livraria Lello: not just in its architecture, but in the way it invites you to linger, to be fully there. This essay feels like that, a space to dwell in what is, rather than chase what might have been.