In the end, we are not just one person, but a collection of countless people within us who have made our life such a journey. Each person we meet leaves a token in our heart that we remember them by, and sometimes we lose those tokens along the way, while others permanently tattoo their names onto our soul. They etch their name into the very way that we view the world, and shift the course of our life forever.
They may be living or they may be gone, but they are part of us, and no matter how hard we try, they will never leave us, because people can not fracture their very essence of existence. The hardest truth of this is when someone is living but no longer accessible, it becomes like a gate at the entrance to heaven, or really, it keeps us in a sort of living hell. Therefore there are countless people who have died long ago inside their mind before their physical body begins to wear down, what are they living for? The memory of when time stopped.
I strongly believe that there are moments in this earthly life when a moment in time is snapped like a Polaroid picture and put for safekeeping inside a soul. Further, I believe that there are times when we hearken back to those moments when eternity shone in radiance for just a splinter in the vastness of our meaningless monotony, when those inscribed names in our souls light up, glowing bright.
Those nostalgic reminiscings are when we remember how to feel, how to be human, and most of all, how to love and experience the joyous journey of our life. They are also when we cry because we feel so much, we are stripped back to the very depths of our childlike pain and sorrow for what we have lost in the waves of the ocean of stress and despair that has consumed us. We lament our lost innocence, our sinful actions, our inability to be what we once were or hoped to be, and most of all, we lament our distance from those moments when time stopped.
Do we not think about them every day? You know who I mean, because they are the most personal memories that keep you up at three in the morning with tears and sighs and gasps of sorrow. Do not deny that you think of what could have been, of what you wish would have been, of all you know was just so right. It felt so right, looked so right, and you felt as though God himself had ordained you to be the main character in a story for the ages…before it all came crashing down around you like a bottle of champagne at a wedding being shattered on the ground.
You wish you could pick up the pieces of your heart, your mind, and your very existence itself, but the more you try to grab the pieces the more it slices your hands. Soon you grab the pieces just to feel the pain of trying to get your life back, because are those memories, or often that one person, not your purpose for going on? So you never let go of the shattered glass, because they mean too much to you, as that is your story. The glass is like splinters in your hands that are driven in more by the day, reminding you of what happened, who you once were, and what you have since lost. Nobody can see the damage that has been done.
We listen to music and read literature to relate to others, to know that other people have this pain that we hold in solitude, this monster that lives so deep within our heart that even we do not know where it lurks. We experience art not only to relate but to feel the pain again, so that we can remember those we have lost, those we hold dear, and those we have yet to meet. We write to tell others that yes, I too am human, I feel the ever impending sorrow of our condition!
Our love is so great for the past that since we are no longer in it, we wish we could lay beneath the dew. Is that not the most peaceful thing to a mind on fire? A soul that has been pulverized? A human being that has been stripped down and torn to their very point of existence? One can imagine a young woman in the Victorian age lying on her back at two in the morning looking up at the stars next to the grave of her betrothed who has perished in battle. Does she not long to be with him? For any love that is strong enough, one considers joining the person behind the glass wall.
If a man does not have anyone for him on this side of the curtain, does he not wish to be with his brothers and sisters beneath the clay who are more akin to his state than those who can yet touch him? If his heart has been touched by a divine distillation of beauty and he can not behold it nor hold it in his arms anymore, where shall he go? Shall he flee into the wilderness, into his inner soul, or will he toss his mind into the flowing stream so that he finally gives up meaning altogether, going on with an animal-like existence?
In the end, his hope in not a better future, but a recurring of the past, is what drives a man whose soul has escaped the linear progression of time, and truly, has been frozen to a moment he can not escape. This would not be a problem however if he forever lived in that moment, for when eternity smiled on him, his beginning and his end were fulfilled, and in that golden drop of time, he was no longer shackled to this earth nor plagued by troubles, but he was free, as though the first man to walk back into Eden.
Therefore returning to the coldness of earth, the chains around his feet, and the cloudiness in his head and heart, he yearns for nothing more than to return to the place he knows exists. He will aspire to return at all costs, for that was life fulfilled, as he learned that beauty is truth, and in the end, the only way back to truth, is through God.
“The world will be saved by beauty.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
