That you lose people along the way is part of the deal you don’t get to know about until it’s too late. Notions of fairness are far away from this aspect of life; in fact, death is the epitome of all that is unfair. Unfair, and expected, and natural.
But you never get to see them again. Not once. Not ever.
It’s better you never meet anyone than have them ripped away. If you hide away, you can protect yourself. If you never engage with anyone then you don’t have to be devastated when they are no longer there. When they are no longer anywhere.
Yet we know that this is essentially vanity. It is worse looking in on the world, when everyone else is unashamedly, nakedly showing themselves for themselves; when people who know well that the potential of loss is in every single whispered word, foreheads barely touching, the air heavy with an energy, when they do this anyway. Why? Well, why not? What else is there? Loneliness is powerful. Togetherness – less powerful. But nonetheless you share the same enemy.
And, yes, death visits all of us. The closer it gets, the more it looms. People you love, people who perhaps love you too, fall away. The world gets worse. Such longing, such paralysing uselessness: what is the function of this aftermath? Is it even right to think about an aftermath? Maybe it’s love unravelling itself again. Maybe it’s the sense you, together, made of a world you miraculously shared. When someone is taken away, half that sense is gone and the rest by itself is a tangled, brambled, pissy mess.
People take their leave in other ways, scattering to all points of the compass. Away from what was solid and into new forms, new shapes, with new people and new adventures. Sometimes this means that you are left behind, mourning what was, whilst the other soul is dancing on different zephyrs.
This hurts, because how could it not do so? What pains the most is the realisation that it is just the way of things. Small motions, tiny movements, a hop and a skip and suddenly there is a chasm of time, distance, shared thoughts. What can you do but just carry on? Perhaps a thought here and there of how the world once was different, because you were part of a we. It is worth it. It is completely and utterly and barmily and heart-bubblingly worth it. Love always is.
Is it vanity to want to hold on to these vignettes? Or, rather, what harm is there to doing so? I suspect that humans are at their fullest when there is also a smidgin of regret, of sadness. When there are might-have-beens rather than never-weres. This holds the tiniest, most irrational, most wonderful speck of hope.
For in this second scenario, there always is a chance that one moment on one day, perhaps the day of the country’s patron saint, someone who you’ve not spoken to for 25 years and nobody’s seen hide nor hair of for at least ten years, all they do is go online one time and click ‘like’ on a video of yours.
They have never been online, never succumbed to social media, and that is both unusual and somehow admirable. You have no idea what their life is like now. You really have no right to any of that knowledge, not if they have chosen not to share it. In fact the best thing you can do is walk away again. The honourable thing is to leave things well alone.
But that one click, that one ‘like’: this is not just an in-passing sop to the online world. It is a wave, a hello across the years and the seas and the land and the lives.
For that one moment, a second or a minute in their lives, all these years later, they have thought of you. They have decided to click. They have decided to say: I see you. I am still here.
The power of this is impossible to describe. They have come back to life. To your life, for one moment in their new lives where you never belonged and never asked to belong. But the click, the click says: Whilst they and you still breathe, then nobody is ever, truly, lost. Angels don’t sing or strum their harps; there is no sudden burst of heavenly light; you will not take each other’s hand and walk off together into a sunset; you may not even see them again. But you know they are there, and whilst they are still around then all you and they ever dreamed of mattered. If only in that moment when your eyes once locked and the world stopped for two.
