JULIA HARRISON
I understood entirely the painful significance of a new year. It’s what it leaves behind. Time is relentless and without compassion. It relinquishes the fallen without a second glance, pulling all living things along with it. The ones I left behind would be entering a different year, a year in which I never existed. I would be left behind, forever frozen in time. With each passing day, each month, each year, the space between us, between our last interaction, our last memories, would continually expand, growing until the colors started to fade and I became a shadow of times past. A sepia image buried beneath an ever-growing pile of new memories and life experiences.
It was cruel and heart-wrenching, but it was necessary. No life would ever be lived if loved ones remained with the dead, trapped in the timeframe of their passing. No healing could occur. Healing involves not forgetting but laying the dead away in a special place deep within the dusty unfrequented corners of one’s psyche.
Leaving those memories untouched, undisturbed, does not imply a lack of love or that the dead have been forgotten. Quite the opposite. It illustrates how revered and adored the lost ones were, how debilitatingly painful it would be to revisit their existence when the current day doesn’t afford the luxury of interaction with them.
A new year brings hope and new beginnings, but for the loved ones we lose, it brings a painful distance and a reminder of what we now must live without.
The clock ticked on. The present slipped silently into a new year, greeted only by silent tears. From the outside, I looked in. The physical distance between us remained, but every other sense of distance grew, pulled by an invisible current like driftwood floating out to sea.
Quietly. Gently. Inescapable from the relentless undertow of time. Leaving me behind, powerless to do anything other than to watch the gulf grow.
