I guess that’s what happens when you lose someone you love and you lose them quickly, unexpectedly without warning at a time when you figure you have so much more time with them ahead of you. You go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to a ringing phone that’s going to usher in news you don’t want to hear but can’t avoid no matter how much you try. And you don’t have time to say goodbye. Such a small word really, but as soon as the chance to say it gets taken away from you it suddenly means so much.
Everything before everything changed feels like another life, like it happened to someone else because now you think, looking back on it, that there was no way something like that could have happened to you, no way it could have happened and you survived.
Because things like that happen to other people. You are separate from them, distanced from the names and faces on the evening news, from the stories you hear friends tell about other people and families to whom tragedy has struck. So you continue on with your life, turn off your television, shut out the light and crawl into bed. You sleep with the comfort of knowing that they are not you, you are not them.
Then, one day, it happens. Time catches up to you. Fate, luck, chance, the outcome of so many decisions and choices made by so many people over so many years that lead you to that one seemingly unavoidable moment when you wish you could go back and change everything. But you can’t. So instead you ask yourself: how did this happen to us? And that question will torture you for years, maybe forever, until you accept and start asking the right question, the one we should all be asking ourselves all the time: why not us?
And time keeps moving forward and so do you, and you realize after not having been able to feel it for a while that your heart’s still beating. People lose people all the time, you’re not alone in that so you figure you ought to learn from it, learn from how fast these things can happen, how fast life happens and how easy it is to take it for granted. Because we do it all the time, something as simple as thinking we know what tomorrow will bring. We expect everything to go as planned - we expect the subway to come, for our local coffee shop to be open, for our jobs to be waiting for us. Above all we expect the people in our lives will be waiting for us, too.
If you’re like me you know better and you think people who don’t are a lot worse off than you because they don’t understand (but at some point eventually, they will) that this is it. Because this isn’t misplacing. No, we can misplace all we want because with misplacing there’s a very distinct chance that whatever we’ve lost we will inevitably get back. And that’s all we need isn’t it, that logical answer of, well it couldn’t have just disappeared into thin air! Your keys, a book, your iPod, subway pass, that letter or picture. I just had it, you think to yourself. I just had it.
Your logical will struggle with your non-logical as you try to come to terms with the fact that there is no re-tracing your steps, no hope of ever getting back what you’ve lost. Finality like that is overwhelming and it changes you, it has to, because when you lose certain things for good like a person or a love or a chance of a lifetime you’ve got no choice but to see the world differently along with your place in it.
If you’re like me you’ll sleep fitfully and will wake some mornings even after so much time has passed and still think to yourself – was all of it just a bad dream? And for the briefest of seconds, in the amount of time it takes to blink an eye you’ll remember what it felt like to be truly happy, as the weight of loss lifts off of your chest and frees you to how you were before when you were not them, they were not you, when you were just like anybody else.
So you learn. Yes you learn to take more risks and more chances and to be brave and to not be so afraid, but the most valuable thing you learn are the tricks that Time can play, bewitching, deceiving, there’s-never-quite-enough-of-it Time. You know now for certain something so obvious and yet were only really able to fully understand five years ago —that you can just have a lot of things before they slip right through your fingers.
The question now, I suppose, is how often do you let them? Or have you also learned the very important lesson of knowing when to tighten your grip on what matters while you still can.
