The Unbridged Longing

Mirabai never met Krishna in embodied form. Her longing was structurally unbridged—it could never be completed, never satisfied in the way she might have hoped. And yet she did not collapse into despair; instead, she made the longing itself her path. This is radical: she loved the unbridged quality, the eternally unrequited nature of her devotion. In anticipatory grief, many of us desperately try to bridge the gap: to say everything unsaid, to fix every wound, to reach some state of closure before loss arrives. But what if the gap is precisely what we need to honor? What if the unfinished business, the things we'll never say perfectly, the moments we can't reclaim, are not failures but the actual texture of love? The unbridged longing teaches us that love is not about completeness or resolution. It is about remaining present to a space between us and another that can never be fully crossed. We can work toward greater understanding and connection, but we can also accept that some distance will remain. This acceptance, paradoxically, is freeing. It releases us from the impossible task of preparing perfectly for loss, and instead asks us to love across the very gap that anticipatory grief has opened.