Writing about love in the form of human connection has always been a challenge for me. I prefer things I can see, hold, or at least explain with some semblance of authority—the sharp edges of black and white, the comfortably clear and definitive. Love, on the other hand, is a vast and nebulous thing, a shape-shifter, always becoming something else—messier, softer, sharper, truer. And just when I think I’ve found the edges of it, it spills over, leaving my words indefinitely inadequate, in constant need of revision. 

But while love between humans is often as complex as humans themselves, not all love is bold and dramatic; some love hides in plain sight, in the small, everyday moments. These are what I think of as the invisible things we love—the details that quietly stitch meaning into the mess of our days, like the binding thread in a piece of clothing that holds everything together but never gets the attention that perhaps it deserves. 

It’s easy to not appreciate the invisible things in a culture hellbent on distraction. I am as guilty as everyone else in this regard. Just this last week I spent an entire afternoon scrolling through TikTok trying to figure out if I’m too old to understand Gen A style (spoiler: I am). When I finally came out of this trance I felt not only older but oddly emptier, as if the hours I’d lost weren’t just stolen but willingly given away.

And when I work to give full attention to my senses, I’m shocked at how abundant these invisible things I love are. They reveal themselves in the faintest sounds, the softest textures, the subtlest shifts in light. I hear them in the distant hum of a nearby creek after a heavy rain or the uninhibited laughter of the two teenage sisters next door, sharing a moment on their porch.

In my better moments I wonder if the universe gave us small, beautiful moments just to keep us from losing our minds entirely, to ground us in what matters. 

Still, it’s become so easy in this increasingly loud and chaotic world to replace my awe with irritation. When I let it, I can feel the faint bitterness seep into me like a quiet, persistent shadow as I push back against the unexpected delays and trivial hurdles that prevent my day from living at full speed: misplaced keys, traffic delays, poor wifi, the way my son will run his pasta-heavy hands through my recently washed hair with wild abandon. I forget my senses, not just in terms of judgement and priorities, but literally. I give into habit. I react. I forget to feel.

Some don’t have that luxury. 

Last year, a friend of mine lost complete hearing in her right ear. Sudden sensorineural hearing loss, she told me. It happened overnight. She went to bed fully able, and woke up having lost half of her world of sound. It was disorienting and frightening, like stepping into a muted reality, and she's since learned that it might be permanent—a reality she’s still adjusting to, both emotionally and practically. It’s a reality that’s forced her to pay closer attention to what remains: the sounds she can still hear, the moments she can still savor.

Last month, several of my friends were impacted by the devastating fires in LA. In a video one of them shared, they open the gate to their home, and behind the seemingly untouched hedges, their house is reduced to rubble—a stark, surreal contrast that’s hard to comprehend.The hedges, standing green and unscathed, seemed almost mocking in their survival, a surreal contrast to the destruction just beyond them. 

These two stories are different in their specifics but united in the way they expose life’s fragility. Their losses have forced them to reevaluate what truly matters, to strip life down to its essentials and see what’s left, and to appreciate this with the knowledge that what they still have can always disappear when they least expect it. 

But why should we wait for loss to teach us what we should already know?
I want to notice now. 

I don’t want to keep speeding past the invisible things I love, only appreciating them in hindsight when they’re gone. Because it’s these small, quiet loves—the ones we so easily overlook—that make life whole. And I don’t want to forget them anymore.

Not for a single moment.