My habit is to imagine my heart like a room of defined walls. All rooms have a purpose: this one contains the love I have. There’s windows. There’s doors. There’s volumetric space: height, width, length. It is warm and bright. Love isn’t sitting on shelves and it isn’t hiding in drawers but it is in the open and takes up space the size of every one I love.

There’s a spot in the center with my husband and kids, my close family, and my dearest friends. I’d have put my cats there too. The rest of the room fills out with relative social distance, and I got to tell you – I’m lucky. My world is full of lovely people. Chocolates showed up at my front door on the day of Ivan’s death, unattributed. The suspect list was very, very long.

I imagine this space like a spot where people come and go, or stay. Hopefully stay. I prefer them to arrive and never to leave. I think they call that “attachment”.

If someone leaves, and sometimes they do, then it becomes a room with more space, where the part they were in is now unoccupied, cavernous, obvious. Like where I can feel my heart echo off the walls. Like a crowded party but I notice every absence.

There is an error to this metaphor. It presumes a static size. I look around my life and assume what is true for me now is what will be in the future- even though experience screams that the steadier constant is change. The walls have been moving outward as more people become important to me. For instance, one of my closest friends now was almost unknown to me seven years ago. Seven years ago I would not have fathomed that I would have the job I had. Seven years ago I had no sense of my current neighborhood, or home. Seven years is not that long of a time in the grand scheme of things, but moment to moment? It fills a life.

My heart is a space that, if I am open, will continue to grow. I have not yet met all those I will love.