We have all fallen for temporary people.
They come as swiftly as they go from our lives; with their reeling minds and striking bodies and real, wide-open hearts. They are hurricanes and madness and wrecking balls; they’re sunshine and blissful surrenders.
We wish to shelter ourselves from the storms that these people embody but we also wish to walk right into the middle of them. We want their chaos and their madness; we wish it the way in which others once wanted ours.
We are advised to not fall for these people. And yet we do, knowing full well we will’t keep them. How could we not, in spite of everything?
We want their nows and forevers. We want their sleepy half-smiles over coffee every morning and their sturdy arms to lull us to sleep. We want their wine-drunk Saturday evenings and their lazy Sunday mornings. We want their words and their silences; their downfalls and their strengths. We want the entire of the people we love but we’re sometimes only given a fraction. And so here’s what we do with that as a substitute.
When we don’t get to carry on to the people we love, we wrap their memories in between our heartstrings and we stock them with us. We remember the lilt of their laughter on the times when the rain comes pouring down. We envision the curves of their skin when we’d like to know that each one is just not lost. We take the moments we share with these people and we freeze them, we immortalize them, we keep them preserved and alive inside the traditional museums of our minds.
We don’t must curse and resent and forget the people life didn’t allow us to hold onto. We don’t must rid ourselves of their impressions and shelter ourselves from their impact. We’re allowed to allow them to in. We’re allowed to allow them to matter. We’re allowed to interact within the temporary foolishness of falling for somebody who is just not going to be left holding our crippled, wrinkled hand fifty years down the road.
Because some people simply will not be meant to remain endlessly. Some people come into our lives for a season, for a reason, for the easy purpose of showing us the world in a way we’d never have seen it otherwise.
And what else can we do but hold onto these people while we’ve them?
What else can we do but grow enchanted by the brilliance of their minds, by the purity of their spirits, by the strength and intensity and contrast that they solid into the colorless corners of our lives?
What else can we do but memorize the scent of their skin and the taste of their bodies and the wisdom of their ever-reeling mind, as long as we still have them captured contained in the tangible corners of our Universe? What else can we do but love them with all the things we’ve before they’re gone?
After all, we never understand how much time’s left.
And whenever you have a look at it that way, it doesn’t seem quite so unbearable in any respect: to permit yourself to like someone with all the things you’ve got – after which to completely and completely allow them to go.
