My grandparents deeply loved each other for an odd 60 years, and they met in their late twenties. If I’d love someone like they loved each other right now, I’d have to live up until the age of 92 to experience all that which they experienced. Which is preposterous, ‘cause seeing how life has been going I’ll be lucky to reach the age of 70. Still, I have witnessed something completely out of the ordinary, and I’m only realizing just now that such a love is, in fact, the ridiculous dream I’ve been chasing due to my perceiving it as the most natural occurrence. It is my fallacy. I didn’t see how lucky those two were. And, perhaps, how lucky I am to at least have witnessed such a love in my lifetime. I guess in terms of luckiness, right now, I should consider myself extremely blessed if I’ll have a love-like endeavour that ends with some kids and a divorce at 50 plus these days. Not to mention anything remotely close to real love at all. The way they’d sometimes look at each other, man; I’ve only met one girl that ever looked at me that way. It’s a gaze, in her case, or rather a glance that I remember witnessing in my grandparents’s case, of complete understanding, acceptation, and tenderness; an almost telekinetic moving into purposed action; a speaking from soul-to-soul. She died at 88, he died 10 years later. And right before he did, he prepared us by saying, ‘Little Marie has been beckoning me in my dreams’. Since then; three days. And he waited until all his children surrounded him before exhaling his last breath. At home. At his terms. In his favourite armchair. Peacefully. It was the first non-struggling death I had ever encountered, after having witnessed many that were as a matter of fact gruesome and untimely. And, I’m not gonna lie, all of this is something I’d wish for all people as kind as they were, but it’s also something I deeply envy. More than anything, I am saturated in the knowing that I blew my chance at having such a love, shared lastingly. We fucking had eternity. And, if anything, I am deeply aware that come the day I must die, the soul I’ll be beckoning, or who has been beckoning me in due time, will only have had a relatively marginal physical presence in my life considering those 60 years of the once witnessed ideal, as she is not physically present in my life currently. The loss of our love; her loss, is a loss that transcends a lifetime. That transcends time. It is a truth that keeps resonating within everything that is not temporal about me. And when everything except that temporality decays and rots away, I can only hope there’ll be another life hereafter, and thereby another chance, in which we’ll meet.
