Table of Contents

Note from our Editor, Ashleah Gonzales

Love is rarely a straight line. It bends, doubles back, and lingers in the spaces between memory and longing. When I set out to curate this issue of ‘Elliptical Love’ I was drawn to writing that explore the unseen forces that keep us tethered to the people we love—through absence, through grief, through the echoes of what was and what might have been.

These writers reveal how love, even when lost, never truly disappears; it reshapes us, imprints itself upon us, and continues to reverberate in ways we may not always understand. I hope these essays resonate with you as deeply as they did with me.

In these pages, love is not just an emotion—it is an orbit, a pull, a presence that never fully lets go.