Quince

Time does that to you

He stood on the beach, cool grainy sand between his toes, as he watched the full sails drift away into the distance, and out towards a sea that seemed to go on forever.  a growing emptiness sat like a cold stone within his chest.  A life fully lived, now pulling away on time's strong winds and swirling tides, taking a large part of him with it, leaving him slightly unbalanced.    But he had the sun on his face.  the wind on his cheeks.  the sand between his toes.   not everything was bad.

He thought of a young woman with a hesitant smile that he had once met so many years earlier, the one that had eventually left him alone now on this beach.  if he could do it over.  go back to that first moment, would he distract and turn the young man away so that he and the young woman would never meet?   a complete life turns on just a few moments, and that one particular moment avoided would surely lead to a different future, but a future containing its own unpredictable losses. he had no way of measuring it, to laying out the odds, or any kind of balance of what would have then become of his life, for good or ill.    A life without the pain of rupture and having to rebuild this far down the line.  Was that even possible?

let's face it, he thought.  he knew he was trapped within the moment of rupture, and in fact had been for years.  The only answer for it was of course to just continue to move forward. put one foot in front of the other.   the answer to most things.  put it in your past.  move forward with your life.   let it go.   

he thought he was working on it.  maybe he was.  maybe he wasn't.   he looked up and was caught up and distracted by a moment of omniscient beauty.  he thought: the sky sure is blue today, isn't it?