running water

“Take your hands out of your pockets, feel the water run” -Caamp, Of Love and Life

“Give me a hug — I might never see you again.” An honest proposition these days. Even if you manage to maintain contact from afar, the connection is a lit match, lost to the wind. Hug like you mean it and tell them you love them. Time fades memories, and life rolls along.

What are you worried about, forgetting them, or waking up forgotten? Some days, knowing they haven’t forgotten about me yet keeps me standing. It gives me a little energy to help make it up the next hill. Maybe I can see them from the ridgeline, off in the distance. Maybe my echoing howl will remind them of my existence. And maybe I’ll remember them on clear nights, when the moon is posing pretty.

Most people never promised to remember. And promises break, like bones or hearts or wild horses. I wonder, is it good that some people live in your bones, in the structure of your marrow? —Those ones who challenged newness into whatever old version of you they encountered. They inspired you, they were a part of some level of growth, and forever they will live in those millimeters. They exist in the expansion. Infecting you with ideas, laughter, lessons, gone but still alive and moving in you like the first burp of the big bang.

Maybe it’s good to be alive in some of them too. Not to be missed, but to be shared across space and time, with love or something close to that. Sometimes it’s reciprocal, but it doesn’t have to be. I don’t even know if balance matters in these cases. I think the universe works out the math. Even if that means a scattered plot of love, connection, and dotted lines pointing to things we’ve all long forgotten.