Savannah Stack ‘25
The rain is tracing down your face, and you smile because you get to experience something you know won’t last forever. That sensation, that moment you experience in time, is a fleeting instant that shall soon come to pass.
This is September.
It wasn’t like I wanted it to end. It had to end.
October comes and goes. It is a weird sensation, slowly losing time knowing there is absolutely nothing a single person can do to keep it from fleeting.
You carve dates on your brain like a knife into stone. In that instant, you hope to remember such a pleasant day forever. But in the next year, those starred boxes in your calendar roll around, the ones you forgot to erase, providing you with a stinging reminder that such a moment will never be lived again. You are burdened to remember the very things you wish you could forget.
Here, it is November, December, and January.
Looking back on what once felt endless to me, leaves me to scrunch my nose and furrow my brows. Thinking what I had was infinite was incredibly naive. There is nothing on this earth that truly lasts forever.
I didn’t want it to end. Yet it was fated to reach a final page.
This is February and March.
The worst type of pain is not a heart finally shattering, or the day you finally wake up knowing what you have is gone. The worst pain is not the final petal falling off the roses next to your bed, or reading the last page of your favorite novel. The worst pain is the process of watching the thing you love come to an inevitable end, with no way to gauge how much time it has left. It is the pain of choosing to keep space in your heart for something you are well aware won’t last your whole lifetime.
When a flower sprouts from the ground, it requires a painfully delicate balance to live one more day. The sun and the rain must work together, or else that once tragically stunning plant will soon cease to exist. If there is too much sun, the flower dries out, leaving a shell of what it once was. If there is too much rain, the flower drowns in what it thought it needed to stay alive. Without an alike sense of dedication and intent, the sun and rain kill the flower, even if they are desperately trying to save it.
I never thought it could end. But there I was on the other side of that door, willing you to come back, waiting for the sound of you knocking down the door. You never did.
This is April.
You prepare for this moment for as long as time itself. You don’t close your eyes when you should be sleeping because maybe you can slow down time for just a moment. You fantasize about scenarios of when that anticipated instant finally catches you. What will you do? What do you say? What happens after the end? You prepare, but you’re never ready.
A tear falls down your face, your dog in your arms. You know he would live longer if you just took him home. But you let them insert the needle and squirt a substance into his veins. A part of you is always going to question if you made the right choice. But maybe it is better to let him go now if you are both bound to suffer either way.
This is May, June, July, August.
Heartbreak is an odd thing. There is a physical sensation to it where your heart is repetitively stabbed by an invisible dagger, day in and day out, month after month after month. But then one day you open your eyes, and you barely remember that very person holding the knife.
Then, just like that, it is September again, but when the rain hits your cheek and leaves you to shiver, it is hard to find that smile. The one that came so naturally last year.
Maybe, somewhere deep inside me, I knew you wouldn’t last forever. Maybe I knew it hurt more to stay. But I wasn’t ready, so I drew out our ending. I’m sorry.