A Funny Thing
By: Daniel E. Kramer
Love is a strange thing. It hits you, crushing every part of your being. We all experience its power. Sometimes we love without knowing, without regard to care, and without fear, yet we somehow do it with ambition and purpose. Sometimes we love another person without them ever even knowing it. You know those lovely infatuations of the mind. You and I both have the ability to create a love affair in the mind’s eye. Futures are built, sometimes entire worlds, entire lifetimes, are spent in the daydream of “what could be,” or “what could have been.”
We all know what I am talking about, the lost loves, the ones we knew but which are gone now, the ones that never were, the ones that never will be, and the kind that only live in the space between your ears. Do you ever wonder, think about another, and ponder if maybe by chance they too are thinking of you at that very same moment? Do you ever get lost in the thoughts of your friends, your family, your significant other? Do you ever let yourself get lost in the mind's image of something that could be, the daydreamer unleashed? Love drives you to think about old friends, lost loved ones, moments with them, and the feelings come up. They are always with you, just as a light gives off an invisible heat, so to do the memories of a mind. I wake to see these memories; mostly they are good, sad sometimes though too. It is funny how time changes events for a human’s mind.
I walked the stairs last night to see a small stain that has been left on the tile for over a year now. It was a mark left by my dog, the kind of accident where he got sick and did not make it outside in time. It remains now, as a living memory, at least the part that didn’t come out with the cleaning and scrubbing. At the time I was angry that it happened, and I remember as I cleaned it my inability to get it all off no matter how hard I scrubbed. For some reason it endured, for some reason, I could not wipe it into the oblivion of the past. It was a marker event, the moment that everything changed, the moment that marked the downfall of that poor little, sweet spirited dog. His kidneys had begun to fail, and that was the first sign, leading to the next two weeks of vet visits and slow goodbyes. Caught in his prime, lost unto a young death, we said goodbye to him. Time moves on though, and now when I see that spot, a smile emerges. I know now that I will never try again to get rid of that stain. It is a little piece of what was, still left for only me to remember, for only me to know where it is to see. Like I said love is a funny thing, and it makes us do strange things sometimes, like leaving a stain as a memory, like becoming a hoarder of the scraps of that which still remains.
Love always brings me back. Slowly it wears off, but then it rekindles when the fuel is supplied because of the thick bed of coals that is waiting just under the cooler crust. How thick though is your bed of coals? Are there ways to never forget, to keep the moment feeling like it is the first time? Just remember to remember this; that feelings won’t last forever so enjoy them now before it is too late. Sometimes things leave, and you never know what will come next. Sadness stays the spirit in times of love lost and things gone. When our loved ones are ripped away, recognize the love for what it is even with them now gone. Recognize that each day will bring uncertainty that is mixed with new love, new life, and new spirit. Bad things happen sometimes, and we mistake them as wrong or unfair, but often they are just the natural flows of an unknown and exotic terrain that we humans only barely understand how to navigate.
Mysterious beginnings await all of us. Just as they awaited my dying dog. Just as new love is scary, nerve racking, incredible, so too can be the end of life, the end of time or place, the end to a way of being. A rebirth is a form of newness, death too. They are both a form of change, and it is as certain as anything can be that it will come. Embrace it as the future path you never took, got the chance to see, the love that could have been turned into the love that still might be. What may come next is a question I hope you too get the chance to know and see. For certain, we all will be there soon together.
We the few, the lucky spirits that still live on to walk the earth and ponder. So impossible is any one of our existences, so impossible it is that of the trillions of possibilities I am me here today writing, and you are there today reading. Perfect in this moment our love of life leads us to go on looking into the past so that the future can know no bounds, hold no limit, and empower and free us by letting us all know that this too shall eventually pass. The good, the bad, the body the mind, the two halves that make us one loving whole. Just imagine, just daydream a little today about those loves yet to be had, those amazing new moments waiting for us all to find them. Just know that the saddest moments might bring us to something that we would never have thought possible.
