Temporary Existence

Your voice lingers in my memories, these memories that are fading quietly into the distance. I desperately try to grab hold, clawing my way back to the times that made sense. Because, this time doesn’t make sense anymore, or, I have found, it makes perfect sense, depending on the way that you look at it.

You see, before you died I believed in this temporary existence more than I believed in the unseen realm that continues on forever. But, now that it is the time that exists after you are gone, this all just doesn’t make sense anymore. This temporary, tangible reality makes no sense to me. What makes more sense is that you are still here, just out of reach, listening to my voice and smiling at the way I move my mouth or give a sideways glance when I am nervous. You are still here and waiting until we all join you in eternity.

For, how can you have once been here, full of the most genuine, boyish, electric, charisma, and then in an instant, be gone forever?

Our temporary existence is lingering all around me. Examples reminding me that it is true, this is all a fleeting time, moments slowly evaporating like the fog that hovers over the river at dawn. So temporary that I struggle to understand if it is even really happening. And, if it is happening, where do these moments go after they are gone?

For, if I am not mistaken, my eyes see these moments take place and my heart fills with joy as they play out. Then, they are gone, evaporated into the flow of the river that separates the beginning from the end. Where does this temporary existence go? Are these moments still here, everywhere and nowhere all at once?

I think so. They must be. Because, those times, those precious moments that only you and I shared, make up the all encompassing love that radiated out of our skin. Skin that was so electric to our touch, full of so much life that there is no way it dies. Those moments that I can’t relive with another person while I am in this temporary existence, ache to be talked about, ache to be laughed about, and ache to be cried about. Anything but stuck in my head without hope of leaving my tongue.

And so I will do these things. Laugh and cry, live into the memories of our temporary existence because there is no other choice. I will do this alone until we are reunited and can do this together. I will also make new memories, full of life and wisdom that only comes from living into my reality. A reality that I didn’t ask for or predict, but a reality that is part of our story. This story that continues on with my eternal soul living in this temporary existence until it meets yours once again.