Life's too short

Sometimes I just sit and think.
I know, you're completely amazed, right?
Today Tuesday 17 of August, I am older, a lot older and I feel it! Sometimes I write out my feelings and draw them in some semblance of order towards logical conclusions. Well, logical for me at least! I'm not going to do that today, instead I'll just say what's on my mind and leave it hanging. Not every question you come across in life has an answer. Some questions just produce more questions and even considering the fact that some questions have multiple answers it always seems that there are always more questions than answers.
When you read a magazine it tells you things in an informative way. When you converse with people you tell them things and they tell you things in return but do you ever think about the things you come across or do we just blindly accept them. I don't mean common, everyday thinking like what you will have for breakfast or about your daily routine ahead. I mean do you ever think about the small things, thing you take for granted maybe or generally about those little changes in life that add up slowly into major differences?

On Saturday afternoon I was taking to a friend (see last blog) about the men in my life that I had loved and who had loved me. On Sunday, Hitomi and I met up with Reisa for coffee, freshly cooked dumplings and rice with soup.  We were out ostensibly for Hitomi to take some photographs of me and then for us to meet up with Reisa for lunch.

I watched a butterfly on a flower. He wasn't around a few days ago. A few days ago he was a chrysalis and a few weeks before that he was a greedily chopping caterpillar on a leaf, eating his fill.
With our lunch the conversation came to be about the past. We started with last November and moved slowly backwards to such things as childhood ambitions.
On Tuesday I celebrated my birthday and Hitomi and I shared a large bottle of clear Czechoslovakian Absinthe, commonly known amongst the Bohemians as 'the green fairy' and apparently its guaranteed to blow your mind. So much so that it was banned for almost a century in France. The mixing of absinthe and French cognac, a la Toulouse Lautrec, 'earthquake cocktail' style certainly helped to push us over the edge, We blew our minds and made obscene telephone calls to each other Then we fell into bed and tried to make love and in between the hysterics and tangle of legs, we fell asleep!

I say things like 'today we are the sum of our lives so far. We are our total experiences, the things we learned and the things we didn't learn.' What about when we were fifteen or twenty or twenty five, those days and the people in them have gone. Are those days important? They add up to the first years that become the first chapters of the book of your life and that has led you to the present, to this part of the story.
How important will this day be in ten years time? It may well be lost within a string of similar days although I do tend to remember my birthdays and since I write about them, as indeed most other days, in my personal journals, I can remind myself of moments from those writings.
Where will that butterfly be in a few days time?
Each day takes us closer to that last one.
Some people that I have loved have already lived their last day and I can't say "Hello" to them anymore.
I had even contemplated my own end during my worst of times and suffering from ill health. Death is not just an end of life but a part of it. As we all grow older, we lose people into its oblivion and it's something none of us much want to talk about but it's with us all the time. Death is a true part of life. If we fall from a high place we will hit the ground and as we fall through our years we will hit death sooner or later.

I thought a lot about my Momma and all the things she said and did and although I remember so much joy and so much happiness, I still struggle with sadness and sorrow in her recall. It's hard to describe such feelings but I would give anything that I own for one more embrace with her, one more chance to tell her that I love her and for one more chance to thank her for everything she ever did for me. I did it many times and I did my best to make her happy and proud of me. I know she knew my love for her as she left us.
Sorrow! No truth, no kindness, no sympathy can cure us of it. Only time eases our loss and suffering but it does not make us stronger. When the next loved one leaves us we go through all the pain again. Life is the sword of Damocles and it hangs by a fragile hair, ready to fall.
I have changed a lot in these last ten years. I wonder what the next ten will bring.

Hitomi's shoot.