Love, more than any other human mystery, resists confinement. Too fragile to be captured, too vast to be defined, it slips past our grasping and yet shapes our very lives. We know it in the trembling of first touch, in the fire of passion, in the silence of waiting, in the grief of loss. We know it in memory and in hope, in laughter and in tears. We know it in the way eternity can appear, suddenly, in the smallest instant: a kiss that lasts a second and yet carries forever within it.

This book is not meant to be read quickly. Each part is a chamber, an echoing hall in which the reader is invited to linger. To pass too swiftly would be to lose what is hidden in the silence between words. These pages are not steps on a staircase but movements in a great piece of music, circling around the same theme, returning again and again, each time with deeper resonance.