do you long to have your heart interlinked?

Love is a lifeline in a disorienting world. May it find us softly, and without warning.

Do you long to have your heart interlinked?

I did once.
I still do, if I’m honest.

I longed for the connection, the intimacy of it all. I longed to see someone’s pupils dilate when they looked at me—with that quiet, involuntary wonder reserved for someone they love. I longed to feel the tornado of butterflies that dominates your stomach when you see them—not lust, but adoration.

I craved the slow, sacred work of knowing someone—not just their favorite song or their coffee order, but the shape their face makes when they’re trying not to cry. What it means when they pause in their stories. The ghosts they don’t speak of. I wanted to love someone in the way that Rilke once wrote: “for the sake of loving,” not for what they could give me, but for who they were when no one else was watching. Love, to me, was never just romance. It was recognition.

We live in a world that confuses visibility with intimacy. Where someone can see your entire life through a screen and still not know the sound your heart makes when it breaks. We are saturated with connection and starved of meaning. We swipe past potential lifelines. We ghost people who open their souls. We mistake distraction for depth.

And still—we long.
To be loved not because we are impressive, but because we are real.

I have felt this longing grow the way saplings press their roots deeper in ground and stand firmer in their position than ever before. I have felt it in the still moments where it’s quiet outside but my heart aches loud with wanting. I have felt it when reading Ocean Vuong, who once asked, “What is beautiful if not the impossible?”—and I think love, real love, is exactly that: a beautiful impossibility we reach for anyway. We dare to believe in it despite the ache. Or maybe even because of it.

Sometimes I imagine it like a quiet library: two people sitting in stillness, reading different books, but breathing the same air. Not needing to fill the silence. Just existing together, gently, fully. The kind of connection that doesn’t demand spectacle, only presence.

I imagine it like two people brushing their teeth together before bed. A sort of routine that’s deeply intimate. The sort of acknowledgment that says you are here and I am here. Together.

bell hooks wrote that “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
And maybe that’s the nuance we miss when we chase only the rush of affection. The truth is, love is often inconvenient. It asks you to show up when it's hard. To listen when you’re tired. To choose the same person again and again, even on the days when the magic feels like work.

To have your heart interlinked is not just to be chosen once. It’s to be chosen still.

That kind of love is not always found in grand gestures. More often, it’s in the mundane. That shared grocery list on the fridge, the “did you eat today?” text, the feeling when you get good news and daydream about telling your partner about it for the rest of the day.

It’s less fireworks, more candlelight.
But isn’t that what we really long for? Not intensity, but safety? Not perfection, but presence?

Sometimes, I wonder if the longing itself is a kind of love.
If it’s proof that even in loneliness, your heart still stretches toward beauty. That somewhere deep in your soul, you believe that your life can be braided into another’s, without losing its shape.

To be interlinked is to be known—not just by another, but through another.
It’s the moment your heartbeat echoes in someone else’s silence, and you realize you were never alone.

So, yes.
I long to have my heart interlinked.
Not because I’m broken or incomplete.
Because I know that life—real, rich, red-blooded life—is better when it’s shared.
And I still believe that somewhere out there, after a long day of work, a dulled migraine, and a to do-list that never quite ends, there’s someone whose soul will sit beside mine, quietly, and say: “Want to tell me about the book you’re reading?”

And maybe that’s the most beautiful thing of all.