People are impermanent. The love of your life will leave you. On a Sunday morning, they’ll kiss you for the last time.
You won’t know it’s the last time, of course. You rarely do.
Later, when thinking back to it, you’ll try to remember whether they lingered for just a moment before they broke away. You’ll try to remember the placement of their hands.
Much later still, you’ll become stuck on the memory of how you met. How you fell in love with their mind. How they surprised you. How they challenged you to become a better person.
You’ll spend Friday evenings trying to disentangle them from your psyche. Like finding an endless array of their socks at the bottom of your drawer. Wishing they would disappear yet being unable to throw them out.
On bad nights, you want to scream. How could you? Of all the people in the world, you were supposed to stay. Out of all the temporality, all that transience - you were meant to be the exception.
You think about calling them, if only to receive a reminder of their voice on the answerphone. You almost do, but something stops you. You remember a poem you read a long time ago. It went something like -
People are impermanent. The love of your life will leave you. On a Sunday morning, they’ll kiss you for the last time.
Sue Zhao | Nothing but Strawberries
