Moments in time..

There are some moments where time stops and you find yourself wondering whether the moment passed more slowly or more quickly. You take out your phone and respond, “Allen, Allen Yekikian?” and the response is “yes,” a simple, solid, one word that has made time stop and explode into a disappearing black hole. The affirmation makes your heart skip a beat and you realize that place and time didn’t make a difference until a moment that came, that changed everything you’ve ever felt about moments. Your mind can’t even really grasp it, since time is not there. It’s just a blinking text, “yes” glaring back at you. Someone is there, and then he’s not. Two people are there, and then they're not. Time has stopped. Time has slowed, while moving quickly, tricking you into thinking it is still the same, it is just time, but it’s not and it is, and it’s faster and slower. This moment, this realization, has taken two people who made the world better, who influenced this place and that place, and who were one with the stars before the skies pulled them in. The text glares at you, and you can’t even look at your phone because you imagine the car spinning, flipping while shards of glass change the body of two people you touched and hugged, who spoke to you, who posted on Facebook just an evening ago. You have a picture of that image with them standing in the stars from their wedding in your phone and you look at it when you imagine what falling in love will feel like one day. You spent time with them at their going away party while drinking to the rest of their lives and your own, the roads less travelled and the ones never ventured. But the text, this moment, feels immeasurably different to any kind of increment of time you’ve ever known before. You replay the way you watched her silver shoes dance around the dance floor in her white tulle dress. You handed her off to be a bride. And you knew he could not ever imagine a life without her as he stared into the mirror, fixing his tie just before he took his place next to you at the front of the ancient church. Those moments aren’t like this one. People text you saying sorry or they don't. You're a brother, a friend, an acquaintance, didn't know them at all. But whatever you are, you can’t call them heroes yet because that makes them fictional, gone, and they’re not really because playing all those moments in your head makes them as real to you as the phone you want to ignore and the life you’ve just realized you haven’t lived in half as passionate a way. You ask yourself how time played this trick on you, and what death is like. You won’t have an answer yet. But I hope to God when you don't have answers, someone, somewhere tells you that carnations are the worst of flowers, and boxes won't always mean burial, sometimes they will represent treasures, seeds, gifts, growth. And hopefully that same someone will tell you that if Sose and Allen played with time, in this moment of their gone-ness, then maybe, just maybe, they could play with death, showing you that their bodies are the least tangible of things. Maybe because of them, you could understand that heaven was always in them and that immortality is in you too. Maybe you will know then that they are more real than time and death, that time and death are irrelevant inevitable parts of life superseded by the immortality of their love and yours as memory, for stars etched in our hearts are the realest of things. - your friend