Covenant

We are bound by no consanguinity, no blood-borne inheritance of obligation — only the plain accretion of unremarkable days, worn by repetition into something like ritual. I keep no reliquary for this fidelity, no shrine erected to devotion's altar — only the evidence, unadorned: your name still answering when summoned, undiminished by distance, by silence, by the entropy that dissolves lesser affiliations. This is not longing's architecture, not the fevered arithmetic of need — but something plainer, more intransigent: the fact of presence, freely given, unrequested, unrehearsed, and yet perennial as bedrock, patient as sediment. Call it kinship without genealogy, a covenant not inherited but chosen — not passion's combustible urgency, but steadfastness: the quiet, stubborn constancy of one who remains when remaining costs something, and asks nothing in return...