Søren AasReturn On Hope
A poem about what love costs when the other side won't pay
Some people only receive in one currency. The mismatch isn't a misunderstanding — it's the whole architecture of the relationship.
it isn't measurable
not like that
still, if you know you know
when you give credit
and the other doesn't show
plugs never accept words
wares are for cash
good intentions and hope
sunk costs of love
if they don't match
lean back
collapse to truth
superposition
Hope can't be measured — not in the way a return on investment can — yet we spend it like currency anyway. We extend credit. We show up. And sometimes the other side doesn't.
Some people only receive. Good intentions go unremarked. Love is offered in words, but there is no transaction. The mismatch isn't a misunderstanding — it's the whole architecture of the relationship. And the longer you keep giving in a currency they don't accept, the more you accumulate what economists call a sunk cost: money already spent that can't be recovered. Except here it isn't money. It's your essence.
The logic of sunk cost thinking is that we keep investing because we already have — because walking away feels like waste. Some continue.
Some lean back — not a dramatic exit, just a withdrawal of their energy, letting the situationship Collapse to truth.
Superposition is borrowed from quantum mechanics, where a particle held in superposition resolves into a single state the moment it's observed. And then superposition itself, the final word, cast backwards over everything: the relationship was always both love and not-love simultaneously. You just couldn't see it until you stopped looking away. The moment you did, it collapsed into only one thing. This is clarity.
🌊Follow the current on Bluesky