It beckons me, the setting sun. It says not today, I’ll see you tomorrow. But someday you’ll accompany me over the horizon, and then a day will dawn that you won’t see. The culmination of all my life is an ending. Many endings it seems. All that I have now, I will have to part with. Eventually the pieces of my life will fall away. Not in dramatic crashes or world-shaking eruptions. They’ll peel away like the petals of the lotus and float slowly into what I know not, until all that I am dissipates around it. No one will know when I leave, the air won’t feel cooler and the day won’t change its tempo. Eventually, with little fanfare, the world will spawn a nascent day of which I am no part.

I can’t hang my hat on an invisible promise. 100 years of toiling on the surface of the Earth for a lifetime of perfection on the other side. But I find no disquiet in the blip. One day I will be here, and then I’ll be gone. But it’s this meantime. This truly momentous lifetime I’m charging. I cling to it for dear life. I stand in feeble trepidation for a day when you might be here and then you are gone. I stock up on worry in advance for the ailments and the injuries and all the little blights that might be thrown at our feet. I fear the petals falling away from me. I cower behind the moments when I was a capricious human sprite, when I may have sealed my fate. I curse any moment that I traded for thrill at the potential cost of my years.

Because there is a finality to the act of it, of ending. It matters not that there is much I can do, because the options dwindle. And when they run out, that finality is all that remains. The certainty I seek all my life, misplaced. I am a scrappy little creature, scavenging through life for ways out. Second chances. Something that can turn it all around. But I’ve faced death, I raced towards it at 70 miles an hour in a car with no air bags. I know its finality. Its inevitability. And if we’re not very careful, these capricious little moments we steal become final.

But it’s this meantime. Being in love. Surrounded by family. Realizing my purpose. Existing now, at the same time as all of you.

Let it kill me. Let everything I am burn it all down. Let my actions have consequences. Let my moments have finality. Let it all end. But I won’t exist in those endings. I won’t get lost in their event horizons. I won’t trade my moments of present for the tantalizing call of their endlessness. I won’t swap something far more valuable for the hollowness of something more looming. If it will all be over anyway, I will claw away at the flesh of these moments. I will consume their meat with ferocity. I will lick them clean of anything I can scavenge. I won’t rip at the fabric of time in the hopes of creating friction. I won’t fight against the gift of forward motion to try it all again. The beauty and grief of this wheel we run is that where we’ve been is set in stone. Now it is so. And while it naturally causes turmoil in our binary human minds, let it create peace. Let it remove the choice, quell the chaos. Now it is so. There is only this now. And now what?