Sometimes you visit a place, probably a place that gives you joy, yet the route to it consistently slips from your memory. While landmarks have made your memory their home, you fail to attend to the intricate details of the road. You arrive at a juncture where you start searching for a familiar place, not in the physical world, but in a person.
Sometimes you find yourself watching a cliché scene, like an actor expressing love, and you've witnessed multiple renditions of the same act, each time with different actors and it becomes the point where you pause and question yourself if such moments are merely alternate experiences or if reality is mirroring these scripted scenarios.
Sometimes you meet a stranger and they unfold themselves in a three-and-a-half-hour telephonic conversation until your phone battery has exhausted, and so are you. You run out of words and there is nothing else you can think of. You eventually take a step back – and years down the line, you don't even remember their name, or what they talked about, or what memories they are made up of. You remember them as someone you had a three-and-a-half-hour-long conversation with because it took you by surprise. You remember their voice.
Sometimes you contemplate answers to a question someone asked you a decade ago, even if they are no longer there to hear you out. The question becomes what you write about, till you have a non-comprehensive list of answers you'd present to them if you ever cross their path.
Sometimes you encounter something written and you fail to understand its essence. You make futile attempts trying to imprison its essence in your memory. Some weeks, or even years, later you encounter it again, without the memory of ever reading it and understand its essence because it fits right in the cracks of your heart, becoming a part of you. It makes me wonder if something similar occurs with people you encounter repeatedly—whether, with time, their essence finds a home within you, leaving an indelible mark despite initial misunderstandings.
In the grand scheme, all of this doesn't matter. You hold time as you hold your beloved's hand in yours, who is about to run wild to convey the physical manifestation of the excitement running through their veins, choosing to mentally pause amid the rush, with the warmth of your touch translating their excitement into your peace. Everything cherished in one moment is painted with disinterest in another.
Everything becomes insignificant and inconsequential, everything fades into insignificance, as if it never mattered.