It's a strange thing — how a place can bring a person back so completely. I wasn't thinking about you, and then I was, fully, as if no time had passed at all. The particular quality of your presence, the way you looked the last time we said goodbye, the expression you were trying to hold together and couldn't quite. All of it returned at once.
And then, the way these moments do, it made me think about time itself. How little of it there actually is. How much faster it moves the more closely you're paying attention to it going.
I've been thinking about this more than usual lately. Everything that felt recent turns out, when I examine it, to have been long ago. The years between then and now didn't feel like years while I was inside them. They felt like ordinary days. And now they're gone, and I'm standing on the far side of them wondering where they went.
All past time is in the same place. It lies together. Everything slips into the same abyss — and what we call a lifetime is barely a point.
I don't say this to be bleak. I say it because I think you already feel it, and because I'd rather we looked at it together honestly than pretended it wasn't true.
What I can't forgive — in myself or in anyone — is spending that narrow sliver of time on things that don't matter. Not idleness exactly. Worse than idleness: the kind of busy-ness that feels serious but isn't. The elaborate systems, the clever distractions, the problems that are more interesting to work on than the real ones. A soldier on the march in peacetime can afford to pick things up along the way. When the enemy is closing in, you throw everything down and move.
The enemy is always closing in. We just forget.
Here is what I actually want — what I want for you, and what I'm still working toward myself. Not to escape death, but to stop being afraid of it in the way that makes you hold life at arm's length. Not to live longer, but to be fully present in whatever is left. To go to sleep at night knowing I could not wake — and to feel at peace with that rather than undone by it. To walk out the door understanding I might not return — and to have lived that day in a way that made it enough.
The good in life does not depend on life's length. It depends entirely on the use we make of it.
That's not resignation. It's the only real freedom available to us. And the language for it, when you find it, is always simple. The truth doesn't need to be made intricate. It only needs to be lived.
Missing you, and aware of the time,