I'm Going To Make This Short And Sweet

This can't wait for an editor

Photo by Taylor Beach on Unsplash

Five years ago, the sky altered permanently when I unexpectedly lost my father.

My life has never known its old rhythm since.

Three months ago, the silence deepened. I lost my best friend of ten years, my beloved dog, Rhett.

Then yesterday, across the distance that keeps us apart, my mom lost her thirteen-year-old Jack Russell Terrier. That dog was a living bridge to the life she and my dad shared. A life that is now a ghost, a beautiful thing that once was, but is no more.

Along the way, the circle has narrowed. I’ve lost friends to the conflict of opinions, the shifting of time, and the quiet gravity of growing older. The world changes, they change, I change.

With the passing of seasons and the closing of chapters, existence becomes a silent battle between what once was and what is. Whether you approve of this current version or not, there is no road back. Your life is entirely now.

My dad, a true machine of momentum, used to hand me quotes like lifelines.

“This too shall pass,” he’d say, and, “Keep the faith.”

What we dismiss as cheesy when we are young usually reveals itself as pure truth when we break. Grief, age, the slow loss of innocence.

It makes you look at a book you used to read every single day, now collecting dust on a shelf.

Man, do we want to pick that book back up. We want to read it again. We scan the old pages in our minds, wishing we could choose that option.

But the sun sets, and the sun rises. We step forward into a new day, a new and rigid reality, and there is nothing we can do to halt the dawn.

Life is not a still frame.

It is adaptation.

I am no longer sure if life gets better as the years accumulate. But we do become tougher. We become stronger. We become wiser.

More than anything, we learn endurance.

We build our stamina.

And perhaps that is the anchor. The life support that allows us to keep moving with the movement.