I'm back, asking myself why again. There have been things happen recently for which I have few other outlets. Death, mostly. Death, or worse: possible soon-to-be deaths of women from my previous life. Perhaps it is wrong to group them together prematurely. We're told it's a sin to abandon hope. But how long are we expected to keep hoping? Until the end? Until our end? The math is stacked against us.
Serious illnesses, all of them. A girl I once married and tried so hard to love, her name was Aimless. I loved her too much and for too long, but not well enough. After all that, things ended quickly and without ease.
Another girl who became a woman that I neither loved nor understood, but rather befriended for a few decades and then had to "ghost." Her expectations of me grew wildly out of proportion and where they probably remain. Stage 4 last I heard.
Now another. I'm not sure how to describe her. I, with no rights in this matter, neither father nor lover. She referenced a letter I once wrote her shortly after we met. Apparently I described her well. She reached out through her difficulties to tell me. What does one say in such a situation? One should not attest more than their convictions, and always within the limits of circumstance. I wish her relief from pain and worry, and would do what I could, which is nothing. Worse than nothing. Her son is seven years old.
How do you speak to those uncertainties.
There was my own mother. It seems so long ago, and it is.
Yes, I once had a mother.
Another friend's mother is now not long for this world. Perhaps I should not say such a thing out loud. Though this truth is often increasing. It is the recurring and eternal sadness. We are all given but a small handful of life. Rarely more than a hundred years, usually much less.
These intentionally out of focus pictures I took of the boy seem so strange to me now. I took them here in Charlotte, so perhaps only six months ago or less. He has grown much since and is taller than me.
The tallest creature in the house!
Here he still looks boyish, or maybe that is just what I see when I permit myself the vague pleasures of nostalgic memory.
It is funny and odd to me, what we permit ourselves to see when looking backwards, or equally what cannot be avoided when facing forwards.
What we can not permit ourselves to avoid.
Trains, tracks, and time.
"But all the things that you've seen slowly fade away."
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