She left. The grief is real. The body feels split. The mind keeps replaying. Underneath the grief, if you can sit with it long enough, is a question: was that love? Some of it was love. Some of it was the version of you that needed her to be exactly there. Some of it was the future you were going to have. Some of it was the picture of yourself as someone who had this kind of relationship. The grief is for all of it together. Not all of it is love.
K's definition of love was austere. Love is not attachment. Love is not jealousy. Love is not need. Love is not the small possessive contractions of the heart that get called love in songs. Love is what remains when the center that needs has been seen through. Love and the fragment don't coexist. When the fragment is doing the work, what's happening is something else, even if it has love's costume.
By this definition, most of what people call love isn't love. It's a contract between two fragments. You stay still, I'll stay still, neither of us has to confront our fear of being unmade. The contract has its own emotional content. Affection. Gratitude. Comfort. Dependency. The content gets called love by both parties. When the contract is broken, both parties are bewildered. They thought it was love. K would say: it never was. It was the fragment, with company.
Real love, in K's vocabulary, has no anxiety in it. No clinging. No checking-the-phone. No reorganization of the day around the other person's mood. The body of love is steady. It can let the other person go without dissolving. It can be present without grasping. Most people have felt this for moments — with a child sometimes, with a friend sometimes, briefly. The steady kind. Then the fragment comes back online and the steady kind goes.
If it can be lost, it was never love. It was a contract. K wasn't romanticizing love. He was naming the difference between the thing the word usually points to and the thing the word could point to, if the fragment got out of the way.