The man who waved, but you never saw him
He was hoping you would notice, but it was alright with him that you didn’t
You were focused on other things, on life’s busy path with enumerous distractions
All seeming important then, but now you can’t remember them.
So he waved, and watched you pass by; and though for a moment he was dismayed, his immediate thought —
“I can’t wait for the next chance I get to see him, even if he didn’t see me then.”
And so for your whole life, he kept waving, kept preparing, kept himself occupied with whether you were happy.
There’s a million things you won’t remember,
A million things that when reminded of, you won’t know happened at all
A thousand dinners interrupting your plans
Enumerous car rides and short conversations
Eyes briefly meeting with a beautiful girl who you tried your best to talk to
All these things — they make up a part of me, but I can barely remember them at all
No library could hold them, they weren’t meant to be remembered, they just change anyway
I must be more than what this life has been
You’re trying to pick up every moment and carry it all with you
To not leave anything behind because you’re afraid of losing a part of you if you forget
There’s rose petals tucked between pages, you don’t know how long they’ve been there or who placed them
They’ve dried up, still colorful and bright, yet you can tell they weren’t placed there yesterday
How beautiful it can be to not remember, that there’s meaning in knowing someone else who must have cared placed it there
There’s a part of the day, a brief window somewhere between the closing of the afternoon and nighttime
Where orange light trickles in, the kitchen lights are on, the underside of the countertops are still darkened
Someone’s preparing dinner, you can tell throughout the house
As you sit in the next room over, not knowing the love in preparing it
I’m afraid of that now
Not because I was afraid of it then,
But because I’m afraid of that same moment arriving
Alone and without love
I think it’s impossible, it must be
To know what happened before, and now what happens after
When was the last time?
A cathartic revelation uncovering a burden that had been held there, more closely than you knew
The anguish, impossibility of being aware in so many moments that no artifacts will be buried to remember them
That it’s impossible to remember
How can you remember anything anyway if it’s always moving at a pace you can’t comprehend?
Is it a fleeting task to try and make sure you keep track of the important stuff?
Because what will only happen is that you’ll look back and realize you got it all wrong
But even though you cared about many of the wrong things,
By mercy your heart was still shaped and molded
By mercy, by grace, the Lord gave you no more than you ever needed
That God preserved you, held you, watched over you
That the one constant in all that’s changing all that you can’t remember all that you’ve forgotten all that
you gave up all that you clutched tightly and refused to hand over because you thought it meant something all
that you refused because you didn’t want it to mean anything
Was God there?
He is
I thank You for this life
This life I can’t comprehend
That You’ve always been here
That I didn’t have to remember everything, I don’t have to despair of what I will lose, what I’ve lost
Even though so many were good and so many I loved
I still can’t find words to describe it
Like you’re grieving something, it’s harrowing
Like losing a part of you
The part that never knew in those moments how much they would mean
I was foolish to think otherwise
Do I really believe I am more than what I can remember? That I am more than what this life has been?