Leaves in our Lives

One day you wake and realize they're gone. Mentally you've known; emotionally it never felt real. You hoped they would come back. Maybe you prayed. Maybe you begged God or the Devil himself to bring them back or...even wake you from this nightmare called life. Or maybe, just maybe, you wanted nothing more than to die.

People float in and out of our lives like autumn leaves on the wind. Sometimes we desperately reach to catch them before they fall...anything to keep them in our lives a second longer. But sometimes leaves fall; and sometimes people leave. There isn't always rhyme or reason. There isn't always fault or folly. People drift away.

Holding memories as reality is a curse. How things used to be is never how it is going to be. Friendships may rise from the grave of broken affection but like anything borne from the Pet Cemetery, it is only a twisted reflection of what it once was. Replaying the movies in  your mind's theater of old loves doesn't again cast you in the leading role. And closing your eyes, begging for death, or sleep, won't bring you closer to one who died. Memories and photographs are all that remains of a life. Those fade until all that remains is a phantom of a feeling. You love and hurt over someone you struggle to remember. People drift away, they leave, they die...but it is simply one act in the drama we call Life.

We all hurt. We all love. It is in those feelings we find ourselves. It is in those feelings we find the power to change. Every life that touches ours impacts us. Those we love, those we hurt and who hurt us in return, they all shape us. We shape them. It's a symbiotic, parasitic, and erratic relationship with our fellow human that defines us. We are all touching another's life as they touch ours. We are many lives coming together. We are Legion for we are many.

Lastly, we need each other. We need love. We need bonds of affection that cut across romantic, familial, humanistic, and friendship love. But we also need to know when to let go of that love. The emotion is like energy; it never goes away, it simply changes. So let go of a memory, a friendship, a romance, or the ghost of a loved one and say goodbye. Then turn around to your future and say hello.

One day you wake up and realize...you will be ok after all.