The Physics Of Almost

The Pauli exclusion principle says no two particles can ever occupy the same space. Even at their closest, they hold a distance between them. Maybe that’s what love really is, the almost that keeps us from merging, no matter how much we want to. We drift. We approach. We never arrive.

We spend our lives testing that distance, defining its limits. Every relationship becomes an experiment in proximity, a measure of how close we can get before something gives. We call it love, or trust, or surrender, but maybe it’s just our attempt to test what separates us.

There’s always a line you can’t cross, though you spend years pretending it isn’t there. You build a life on the illusion of closeness, the idea that if you stay long enough, or love deeply enough, you might finally dissolve into something whole. Still, matter resists.

You keep reaching. You learn to measure nearness in gestures: a shared look across a room, the way a person turns slightly toward you before speaking, the sound of choosing what to say next. You start to see that closeness carries its own truth, that what remains unsaid is often what’s most real. There’s a strange beauty in that resistance, though it hurts to name it. The gap is what defines longing. The distance is what makes recognition possible. Without it, there would be nothing left to seek.

We are taught to believe that intimacy is a form of fusion, that love should close the distance until it disappears. We live our whole lives chasing the breaking of boundaries, the feeling of being understood without language, seen without effort. Maybe it begins in childhood, that original hunger to be held so completely you forget where you end and someone else begins. Maybe that’s what we go on chasing. Trying to recreate it. The illusion of being held.

I was safe as a child, sheltered in a kind of certainty I have never found again. My grandparents created a rhythm that seemed protected from time. The days ran together. The house was ordinary, but inside it everything felt eternal. Breakfasts that never seemed to finish. The sound of laughter drifting from another room. A sense that life would always go on. That love itself was unbreakable.

No one told me that families dissolve. That the people who once built your world can walk away from it. I didn’t understand that darkness moves quietly, that it waits for a door to open. They don’t tell you that love ends, or that death can come more than once for the same heart. Or that the unthinkable can happen again and again, each time taking something new. There is no logic to grief. No fairness. Only the slow undoing of what you thought was safe. Loss gathers. Compounds. Becomes the air itself. And somehow, still broken, you go on.

There’s a law for what happens after everything comes apart, not just in people, but in matter itself. When the structure breaks, energy moves outward. Heat leaves the system. What was once whole begins to scatter. The scientists have a name for it. The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is really just a polite way of saying everything falls apart eventually.

Maybe the harder truth is that nothing breaks clean. Entropy sounds tidy when they describe it in books, all numbers and heat loss, but in life it’s messy. Things don’t scatter neatly. They drag pieces with them. You carry what was lost, and it carries you. The system never resets. It just keeps running on the debris.

Outside, nothing has changed. The mail still comes. The streetlights flicker on at the same hour. You can smell someone’s dinner through an open window. A dog barks down the block. Life goes on the way it always did, unaware that anything has fallen apart.

Sometimes I think the laws keep us alive out of habit. The heart keeps time. The planet spins. Everything continues according to its design. You start to wonder if the body understands survival better than the mind ever could. Cells repair. Wounds close. Even the brain learns to rearrange itself, to forget just enough to keep you moving. Maybe that’s its own kind of physics, the persistence of function after meaning is gone.

Maybe the law was never about physics at all. Maybe it was always about us. No two things can ever share the same state. Even now, what’s gone hovers just beyond reach, close enough to feel but not to hold. Everything still moving, still almost.

There’s something strange about how the world continues to operate. Indifferent. Mechanical. The sun always rises. A little colder now, maybe. A plane passes overhead, right on schedule. You watch dust shift through a beam of light. Slow. Ordinary. As if nothing has changed. As if motion itself were the point. It’s both comforting and cruel, the way the universe keeps time when you’ve stopped keeping it.

I used to know the pattern of days. Each noon, the same woman walked by with her dog. The neighbor mowed the lawn on Thursdays, always the same path, back and forth until the lines matched. My grandfather came home at five. He’d set his black lunch box on the counter, rinse his hands at the sink, fold the towel once before hanging it on the rack. Everything happened in order.

Then, without warning, the order shifted. The constancy I’d once trusted gave way to movement I couldn’t track. I stopped noticing the sounds outside, the noise of the neighborhood, the hours passing. The days advanced without me. I still followed my small routines, but life had already slipped past them.

The years kept moving. One season became another, and the ordinary rituals of childhood wore away until they disappeared. The people who filled those rooms grew older. Some left. Some didn’t come back. The house was sold. The street repaved. Even memory changed its tone. What was once bright became muted, harder to touch.

You start to understand that nothing is lost all at once. It happens in increments. The creak of a swing moving in the wind. A name you stop saying out loud. The smell of soap that fades from a towel. Each thing slight enough to miss, until together they make an absence you can’t ignore. What was once your life becomes something you remember.

Love and loss follow the same laws. For every action, a reaction. For every force, resistance. What we grasp eventually moves beyond our reach, motion carrying it forward. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. It only changes form. The same is true of what we grieve. Love doesn’t vanish. It transfers. It becomes memory. Chemical. Atomic. A sequence the body remembers even after the mind lets go. Grief is just the measurement of that transfer, the record of movement after impact.

You begin to see it everywhere. The body repairs. The mind rewrites. Existence redistributes its weight. Nothing breaks clean. It fragments. It finds balance. The missing pieces leave evidence behind, fragile and exact. The life that was whole becomes scattered, and still, somehow, it continues.

Love dissipates by its own design. Something that once expanded begins to contract. Heat leaves. Distance widens. Nothing dramatic, just the slow return to equilibrium. What we call grief is only the evidence of that process, the body merely registering change. The heart keeps time because it has to. The mind keeps records because it can’t stop. Everything else adjusts. The world does not notice the loss. It never did.