| imperfections |

You can never win it all. You come to a point―as we all do―when answers converge into questions and questions spiral out into greater questions, and you're standing in the midst of it all, a blank, an eddy of wind, lost.

It's not so bad, not always. Life and its imperfections, love and its intangible cruelities―all fragments of a universal truth we've known long before. You can never win it all. And you shouldn't even try. No one needs a hero, because―ideally―we are our own.

And besides, if you ever were, where were you when I―when he―when we needed rescuing?

***

Sitting with him, laughing with him, talking about the inconsequential things of little importance over an apple tart―it's my cartharsis and my peace. What I've never learnt to treasure, I'm learning now, over every syllable, every bite, every splinter of our accidental intimacy.

***

I dreamt of my grandfather. He was laughing, protective, a specter of familiarity. Love―in whichever shape or form―will survive. Perhaps not prevail, as the silly songs tell us in their lyrical promises, but it survives. When memories fail, when life wanes, when Time brings its dust and shadows and cracks―love survives.