It’s like a child scooping up fresh cold water from a creek only to lose more than half their prize through the gaps they cannot help from appearing while squeezing with everything they’ve got.
It’s never enough. There’s just no way to have it all.
It was maybe 10 nights total, along with a few early mornings, scattered out along and spilled over 3000 miles, and separated by nearly 17 years.
Conversations both heavy and light, flicks, kicks, slaps and punches, knowing smiles across a room, snorting laughs that cut through on the downbeat, sauce packets pressed between thumb and pointer finger, powdered sugar noses, and a couple of unexpected tears — these experiences shared will act like paper scraps, mementos of youth that’ve been crammed into a time capsule to be buried in the yard and forgotten. Each trinket and crayon scribble holds a meaning earmarked for watering down as roots take hold, as dogs die, as gardens above wilt and go brown from neglect.
What we’ll be to each other in time can only be less than whatever it is that we are today. That’s how the years will reduce by half and then half again the moments and memories, the fondness and friendship. I’m at peace with this. I’ve clung too long to the impossible notion of permanence.
I lean into the temporary now.
I live in the moment during memorable nights and early mornings. I think only of tomorrow as the clock ticks past the witching hour and the calendar flips.
I close my eyes to inhale jokes when they are first delivered, taking them into my lungs with deep, long, purposeful breaths.
I marinate in conversations as they simmer and worry not that their list of ingredients will soon be lost to time.
I accept that the context of every scrap and scribble will become a faded mystery, ink leaving the page and the page becoming brittle to the touch, because I know that the context was once so joyful.
And that broad brush stroke of memory, that knowing of joy as it was once shared, is enough.
