We’ve all had em
Those people who came careening into your life and just by the sheer force of being who they are,
change ya right on down to the core.
To be one of those people though, they gotta go.
I used to really struggle with that, when one of those people carried on outta my life. Wether Dead or Gone, the torment seemed endless, time wouldn’t always heal nor is it meant to. I don’t hold with healing all hurts.
There have been those people in my life, who in my last moments I will recall, with a warm heart, a smile and a tear. For those people have made me, me and I kinda like how i’ve turned out. I have come to understand that to truly and experientially discover what those people meant to me, what I learned from them and what it all could mean, I first have to concede to my inner most self, to accept fully their absence.
I struggled against this fact for years, wishing, pleading attempting to bend reality to my will. Please let it not be so, and yet it is and it was and it will be and there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.
In my life and in a society were we are and I am, so terrified of goodbye. Is there another way to perceive those people in myself? Rather then longing for things to be they way they aren’t?
They left wether by fate or circumstance, the hurt is very real and yet wether dead or gone they are still here with me. In quiet evenings sometimes i’ll play those moments in the cinema of my mind and smile and laugh and cry and accept what is. That is the start. The accepting and then the gratitude.
For those people somehow, in the vastness of this planet, the limitlessness of possibility… they landed at the same place, at the same time with me and we carried on together for awhile. What a pleasure it was to be alive at the same time as them and to have humaned together with all the attendant joy and suffering, messiness and perfection, confusion and understanding, all that goes along with knowing those people.
Had I tied my shoelace or hesitated going through that yellow light, had they stopped for a quick pee before heading out or paused an extra second to reply to a txt we would have never met. None of the terrible beauty of those people would have been imparted. I would not be who I am.
Sure there are 8 billion other people, hell its a sea of folks, but they’re not those people.
Those people are special.
Those were my people.
Wether it’s a good friends death, loosing a love or just plain ol’ growing apart I have done this a lot over the years and it’s a small gratitude practice that’s helped change the posture of my heart and the texture of my mind for the positive.
The next time you feel the longing, sharpness of the absence take a moment use this as a trigger to pause and give thanks that you should have even met such a person, let alone lifed (yes Life d) with them.
Consider how fucking unlikely and remarkable your even meeting them was.
Contemplate how wonderful it is to have been connected to them.
Replay some of those memories with them, ya know the ones i’m talkin about.
Like a candle, they lit up your life or guided you or shone away the fear. What an incredible gift! Yet like a candle they must go out…
Look up at the stars and with conviction say aloud to those people, wether dead or gone.
”Thank you”
- MackieTVM