So often, people speak of romance or love, or both, in the language of for ever and after. It's an understandable impulse, travelled by most at least once within their span. It's the core of it all really - that everyone stands bracketed by a single span, all pink and wrinkled and helpless at the start. At the finish as well.
Ah, that end: the younger we are, all the more distant it seems, so essentially unremarkable. So very implausible. I still remember the day I realised, as more than a brief thought, that I will someday end. It was the day I heard the whisper from my heart. Such awareness does not make me special. It's something most, again, experience at least once.
Some call it a mid-life crisis. I prefer to think that it's an abandonment, an end to the pervasive denial, the one we cling to longest, for in truth, we always knew deep down. It's hard-wired into our genes. It's a part of the clock that ticks us away.
The smallest child is born aware, that they too shall end - it just takes them a while to face that fear, to settle and find, that in this loss, life means so much more.
Either side of twenty one, I saw my father's clock spin forward quickly. It stuttered and leapt. It was broken. Somehow the hands became a blur. Mine did as well. For a while. I was, however, young and therefore not yet ready for denial to leave me: unprepared to let it go ... or him.
He went anyway.
The denial hung around. It had company so at least one of us wasn't alone.
So now, all of this comes back to the language of forever and after. It doesn't exist, or at least not as this rainbow we call living. In our youth we are better at pretending and it's easier to maintain. Never underplay the power of imagination born within days of ignorance.
I was reminded of this a few years ago, when 'the one' also went. She didn't die but ... somehow that made it all hurt more. We were once the halves of a single soul, one spirit cast between two mounds of failing flesh. Nothing lasts forever. If the physicists are correct, not even forever lasts forever.
I know, I'm starting to sound cynical. No?
Well actually ... no! I'm really not, because all of this loss takes the shape of a blessing: one I've only recently noticed. It is of course my time for such thoughts, as I enter my own middle life. It's so very simple.
A span is such a fragile tiny thing. It is but a moment. A blink. An unfinished thought. Do not be sad at this. Be full. Be round. Be! - you have a single moment.
That is all and that is everything!
Oh and, in finding love, do not seek forever: look to the moment and then to the next, hold nothing to feel the only thing that matters.
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