Maybe this is all that love is. The stray eyelash plucked so softly off their cheek, collars adjusted mid-sentence, the ladle passing back and forth as the sauce simmers (and how you blow it gently before they taste and still - 'it's hot, careful' - and then - 'more salt? more ginger? five more minutes? yes, five more minutes') and voices humming in the next room, happily distracted, and no one there to hear it, to know about it, but you and you listen, stopped in the middle of whatever you were doing, to listen without saying anything, without walking in because it is a moment entirely theirs, not for anything but listening to, knowing that your place is to just be there, to hold that moment, because it is a gift beyond words that you're lucky enough to be there to hear it, until the humming stops, and the world comes back and all you can do is go back to your task, aware suddenly of how delicate, how fragile all of it is.