I had too much free time today. Still do, honestly. Funerals do that to a day. You go, you sit there, you come home, and then there's nothing else left. No plans, nothing to hide behind. So my brain does the thing it does when there's space. It wanders.
I was looking back at my life. Nothing specific, just flipping through things. And then this thought showed up, uninvited, a bit rude actually.
One day I'll leave all of this behind.
I've had this exact thought before. I remember because I tried to write about it once.
A few months ago, a friend of mine lost her father. I went to that funeral too. And sometime after, I opened my notes app and started writing something about all this, the leaving everything behind thing. Got maybe halfway through and then just stopped. Don't even remember why. It just sat there since, unfinished, the way things do when you mean to come back to them and then don't.
And today it happened again. Different friend. Also her father.
I didn't handle it very well.
And then you start trying to think your way out of it. Which never works. But you try anyway.
At some point I noticed my hand was on my arm. Right forearm. I do that without realising, apparently, when things go sideways. There's a tattoo there. This too shall pass.
Got it to keep myself humble, keep myself sane. On the dark days it means the darkness ends. On the good days it means something else entirely.
Even the highest points. Even the moments you'd bottle if you could. Those too.
That's the part nobody really warns you about. That the same thing that gives you hope also takes something away. Every good moment is already leaving while you're still in it.
There's a version of this thought that isn't really about endings at all though. It's about the middle. The part where you're still here, still doing things, except some part of your brain has started quietly asking why.
Not loudly. Not a crisis. More like background noise. You're replying to a message, finishing something, making plans for next week, and underneath all of it there's this thought just sitting there going, none of this stays, so does it matter how you do it.
I don't have a moment where this actually changed anything I did. I want to be honest about that. It's not like I noticed myself caring less and could point to when. It's quieter than that. Just a question that shows up sometimes and doesn't fully leave, even when I'm not thinking about it directly.
That's the thought I'd been carrying around for months, half written, before today gave it somewhere to go.
My friend is going to wake up tomorrow without her father. And the day after that. And at some point, maybe not tomorrow but eventually, she's going to have to get up and decide whether any of it still feels worth doing. The caring part. The showing up part. Knowing where it leads.
I don't know if something shifted today or if I just feel hollow and will go home and try not to think about it again until the next time forces me to. Which, apparently, takes a few months.
And yet.
Maybe the point was never to figure out if it matters. Maybe you just light a lamp anyway.
Here's the thing about lighting a lamp that I keep thinking about. You do it without knowing what it's for. It could find a crack and slip through and light up someone else's path, someone who walks that road freely later and maybe remembers, maybe doesn't. Or it could just light up nothing. Empty air. Serve no one, reach nothing, go unrecognised completely.
You don't get to know which one it'll be. You light it anyway.
I don't know if that's wisdom or just coping. Probably coping. But maybe that's fine.
I still don't have an answer. I've now had this thought twice, months apart, and both times it ended in the same place.
So I'll just leave it here.
How do you find beauty in the passage of time if you know that one day you'll leave everything behind?
I couldn't work it out then. I can't work it out now. Maybe you can.
