So the thoughts in my last post have been rattling around in my head for a month now.  They really felt like they needed to go into verse, but I couldn't find the right meter.  Today my ex got married.  Evidently that loosened something up.

They say that life is like a path,

 

We travel with a friend.

But now and then the path will fork

And seem to bring an end.

For reasons unbeknownst to us

Perhaps our friend will say

You take this path, and as for me

I’ll go another way.

 

Why is it then, so often, that

A parting of the ways

Does not feel like a parting but

The turning of a page?

Perhaps life is not like a path,

But rather like a book

That, even though we’ve read it once,

Demands another look.

 

The characters in chapter one

Do not go anywhere.

We flip back in our memory,

And find them waiting there.

So even now is Romeo

Ascending up a wall,

And Catherine and Pip have not

Gone anywhere at all.

 

So though we two no longer walk

Together side by side,

The fact that you are with me still

Can never be denied.

As Dante still loves Beatrice

And Petrarch too his Laurel,

I adore you still, and always will,

And that dear, is the moral.

 

Yours ever,

Roderick de Codpiece

Order of the Knight Companion

It's a bit simple, but it's exactly what I was trying to say.

It's rather common to hear people speak of like as if it were a path.  It's a tempting metaphor really.  Rocky, narrow, dark, winding and sometimes overgrown with trees, our lives indeed seems that way sometimes.  And sometimes we meet somebody on the path who walks with us for a while.  And sometimes we come to a crossroads, and say to that person, "I shall go this way," and they say to us, "I shall go this other way," and before we know it we've said goodbye.  Sometimes our paths recross, but sometimes they don't and the parting of ways was simply a parting.

There are others, perhaps of a more fatalstic mindset, who think of life as a stream, down which we are carried along until we are lost in the ocean.  Perhaps this is also true, and we never really do more than wave at one another as we pass. 

But in my experience, our experience in this life is more like a book.  The people we meet in chapter one may well die by the time the last page is turned, or may in fact to turn out not to have been important to the story at all.  But unlike a path or a stream, a book is not over when you reach the end.  The characters never leave.  They stay exactly in place, and no matter how many times you finish Romeo and Juliet, he is still at this very moment climbing that wall, and she is still as we speak testifying to the moon.  Penelope still unweaves her tapestry every night, and that ragtag group of travelers never does reach Canterbury.  We never really say goodbye to Pip, or Catherine, or Sancho.  And even if we wanted to, we couldn't say goodbye to those we've loved, laughed and cried with in our lives.  Once we've lived something, we can't unlive it, no more than we can unwrite something. 

Which is a comfort in a way.  Or at least, it should be.