to be there was enough

A reflection on time

We spend so much of our lives measuring experiences by what they become instead of what they were. We ask every beginning if it will become forever, every conversation if it will become love, every goodbye if it could have been prevented. Rarely do we ask whether the moment itself was enough.

Perhaps that is our greatest misunderstanding, that we imagine time owes us some sort of ending.

The moment has no ambition. It does not lean toward tomorrow. It simply is.

Quite often I write about love, yearning, the ache, and you. Maybe because I believed there had to be an answer hidden somewhere inside, as though every conversation was leading toward a truth that had not yet revealed itself. I was always reading us as if we were a story still waiting for its ending.

But that was a mistake.

The morning after you told me there was no future for us, I woke up beside you, and for reasons I still can’t explain, everything felt cinematic. The room was still. The white sheets were lived in. The way your hazel eyes were already looking at me before I had fully opened mine. The strands of your wavy hair resting across your forehead. The silence felt loud, as though that room knew something I had only just begun to understand.

You asked me if I was okay.

I heard myself say yes.

I have wondered since whether I was lying.

I remember running my fingers through your hair and thinking, almost instinctively, stay here. Not in the sense of staying with you. In the sense of staying with that specific moment. Don’t rush ahead. Don’t begin grieving something that has not yet ended simply because you know that it will.

It is strange that I needed the future to disappear before I could finally see the present or more specifically — the moments.

For so long, I thought love had to promise me tomorrow before I could surrender to today. I kept searching for proof that the moment was leading somewhere, as though the destination determined its worth. But perhaps I had been asking the wrong thing all along.

The moon has never belonged to the night. It changes, it disappears, and always returns. Sometimes it is impossibly full. Sometimes it is only a sliver, and sometimes it cannot be found at all. Yet we have never called it unfinished. We have never loved it less because it could not remain exactly as we found it.

Maybe people are like that.

I make the joke that you are my moon. Not because you were meant to stay in my life forever, but because, for a brief season, you illuminated it. And perhaps light does not become less miraculous simply because dawn arrives.

I do not grieve you in the way I once thought I did. I grieve the habit of looking beyond what was already right in front of me.

And perhaps that is what growing older is: discovering that life has never been asking me to hold on more tightly to time. It has simply been asking me to just be.

x, ellie