As Long As I’m Here

At the end of the day… don’t you love when someone says something like this? At the end of the day, it is what it is. Nuggets of wisdom lost to the wind if only we could have learned faster or thought harder about the things we had when they were right in front of us.

It’s impossible to tell you just how very many people have come into my life all frantic with admiration and accolades only to eventually – sometimes… actually, often times – completely disappear. I mean one day here, gone the next type deal. And I used to think to myself, what did I do wrong, you know like was I offensive in some kind of way? Disappointing? Rude? Thoughtless, careless, mean?

But now I see the truth and the truth, harsh as it may sound when I say it, which I’m about to do, is that these people conjure up their entire relationship with me in their minds and it was always going to end the way it does no matter what I would have done or not done. I was some kind of movie set or stage or painted backdrop they came and acted their shit out on or in front of for whatever reason until they finally exhausted their little precious selves and fell off to the side like a dried up moth never to return. Possibly even wondering what it was they ever liked about me in the first place. But I will never know, because gone they are and gone they stay.

Isn’t this a rather disconcerting way to live? The ghosting and the hyper-charged entanglements that preceed the eventual and inevitable neglect? No wonder we don’t trust each other. No wonder we are wracked with jitters and anxiety and fear. We do it all to ourselves. We do it all to each other as if it’s normal course of the business of life. It’s as inevitable as it is ridiculous.

There are the few though, the very very few, who stick it out with you. Who actually entrench themselves into you and your world because they want to be in it. With you. You call them out on their stuff, they call you out on yours. And you wrangle through the laughter and the muck until you come out on the other side, maybe dirtier, maybe cleaner or brighter, or not, but you come through and you move on together.

I can count on very few fingers who these people are in my life. They are not perfect and neither am I and maybe we know that about each other and about ourselves and that’s why we can tolerate and celebrate the sticking around. Because we can bear to lose our footing but we can’t bear to lose that kind of convoluted, complicated, hilarious, miraculous, generous, messy, beautiful devotion.

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Photo by Rich Lloyd Judd