The Transience of Life

Our lives here are transient as is the memory of those who’ve held our hearts… our day-to-day workings… our everything.

Pygmy Skeleton Bride

The holidays they come and go and with them are reminders of all the people who I’ve seen come and go in this world… each holding a part of who I am in their special way.

For instance, yeah… I remember Finn’s face… but it’s his hands, the freckles on his skin, the wild hair that strikes me… The things I can imagine him saying… him bleaching my first highlights into my long hair… him teaching me the tools of my trade, even way back then…

Or my paternal grandfather showing me how to check the oil in my first vehicle and the expletives he uttered when he pulled out the dipstick that was “longer than a whore’s dream”… or sitting looking at old slides in the basement and him telling me who was who and where it was taken… or sharing ferreted away treasures he’d found and collected over the years… and I see so much of him in me at times, even down to the smart assed remarks and somewhat cruel and cutting humor…

And there’s the boy who I barely remember his face but who’s hand I remember holding, saying his name… talking to his comatose form… as if there was any real chance that the whippet I was then was going to change this situation, somehow better it… fix this. Feeling a squeeze I was assured was just muscle reflex hours before he was taken, declared brain dead… and now lives on in others per donated organs… a precious gift we can only give once…

And my children’s paternal great grandmothers, both full of their own special brand of spunk, each going in her own way and time… One I remember stories of her youth full of fire and sass and how her hair and make-up were always flawless, the other how much she reminded me of my own grandmother in her look, her demeanor… just her.

I remember friends who took their own lives, leaving a wake that still beats against the shore in the most unexpected ways at the least expected times… washing salt into the wounds left from the harsh rub of guilt and remorse.

And others who live on physically but who’s spirit withers in this husk of humanity leaving them shadows of who they once were…

And me, 18-year-old me, with so much confidence and gumption, the world was hers… There wasn’t a damn thing she couldn’t power through… now she would laugh at my uncertainty, my misgivings, my wisdom… and call me old and cowardly. (I really do miss her, you know. But it takes an innocence to be that bold. A surety that youth and inexperience provides.)

All of these and more — gone to live in the memories I hold, the imaginings I keep, the wishes I hold for them and for me…

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