Facades of impermanence
The world tries to sell you a certain idea of temporality. Your access to everything is temporary; it only lasts as long as you are able to pay the subscription fee. Your playlists, your movies, your gym membership. The impermanence of it all lingers somewhere, reminding you that it can all be ripped away the moment your next paycheck comes up short. Simultaneously, the abundance of new things constantly thrown at you makes the old ones fade from your consciousness as fast as a bumblebee flaps its wings. The carousel moves on. You lose yourself in the moment for one turn, then all the riders are shrugged off and new ones come on. The music does not stop. The carousel does not cease its spinning. It’s only one ride after the other, each one shorter than the last. And in the middle of the vertigo, you can only briefly look back, wondering at what could have been.
But doesn’t a song stick with you for far longer even after you’ve rotated it out of your playlist? Doesn’t a movie you watched fleetingly in your childhood become the backdrop of all your most vivid dreams? You’ll find that a few words said to you out of callousness or tenderness still echo in your head, months after they’ve been uttered, when the speaker has already forgotten they said such things. The name of a person long gone from your life still rises in your mind sometimes, and you still chant it like a prayer. No touch or interaction in this world is ever impermanent. Call that the butterfly effect, or the cosmic scale balancing, or just the natural order of things.
And a person will come. They will try to convince you of something short-lived, even something casual. But then time passes, and you still remember them. The brush of fingers through your hair. The movie they made you watch. The way their handwriting looked, pressed into the pages of a vintage book. And you’ll realize that they’ve lingered. You can move on, but you carry the impression of them to the grave. You carry them into the thousands of imprints you leave on the world before your death.
Then there are those who seek only the grand, immortal, everlasting things. Moments pre-packaged with a ‘forever’ label. Experiences that are deemed memorable before they even happen. But this is a futile chase. It makes you lose sight of the living things that don’t seem permanent until all you have is its memory—and the memory is what stays. That’s when the facade of impermanence fades away. You realize you don’t get to choose what parts remain.
I urge you to move through the world with the knowledge that everything is permanent. Everything lingers. Every touch, however small, lingers. An intertwining of pinky fingers in the sanctity of a bedroom. Stolen glances turned into smiles. Giggles in the corner of the library. The melody of a song you only listened to in the presence of one other person. The smile you gave the moon when it peered at you. The tree you touched because you wanted to. The precious moments you have, flesh to flesh, before flesh turns to dust and dew and other particles that hang, imperceptibly, in the air.