Solstice

 

There’s a tenderness to beginnings that we rarely notice at the time. The ease of a smile, the rhythm of a voice, the way someone’s presence folds into your life as if it had been waiting there all along. In those moments, it feels impossible to imagine a day without them. Forever seems not just possible, but obvious.

And yet, forever never belonged to us.

The truth is, every bond we create carries an invisible clock. Some clocks tick loudly, some almost silently, but all of them move toward the same truth — there will be a last time. A last walk together. A last laugh shared. A last look exchanged across a room. But we never know it when it happens.

That is the quiet cruelty of it. What I call the theory of the last meeting. The final conversation, the final touch, the final memory is never dressed in warning. It arrives disguised as ordinary. You leave with a casual wave, a half-promise of “see you soon,” unaware that you have already lived the last page of that chapter.

And only later, when time has drawn its line, do you look back and realize: that was it. That was the moment you should have held longer, memorized harder, lived more fully. But you didn’t, because you thought you had more. We all do.

It isn’t about blame. It isn’t about someone walking away, or choosing silence. It’s about how the universe moves, folding lives together for a season and then quietly, almost tenderly, setting them apart. Rivers change course. Stars burn out. Even the closest constellations drift. Why should people be any different?

There’s a grief in this that words struggle to hold. The grief of realizing that what you wanted forever was only ever meant to be temporary. That the beautiful bond you thought unbreakable was, in fact, fragile all along — delicate not because it was weak, but because it was human.

And yet, there is a strange, aching beauty in it too. To have shared time at all. To have lived moments that mattered enough to miss. To know that for a brief flicker of your life, someone else’s existence ran parallel with yours, and in that overlap, you were both less alone.

Perhaps that is what makes the last meeting bearable — even if unrecognizable in its moment. That it proves we lived. That we felt. That we had something worth grieving when it was gone.

So maybe the lesson is not to fear the last conversation, but to honor every one until it arrives. To look people in the eye when they speak. To listen with both presence and patience. To recognize that no bond, no matter how ordinary it feels in the moment, is guaranteed a second chance.

Because one day, it will be the last. And you won’t know it. But if you’ve lived it fully — if you’ve loved without calculation, listened without distraction, shown up without conditions — then maybe the last time won’t feel like loss, but like completion.

In the end, everything we hold eventually slips back into the vastness it came from. Not because it failed us, but because impermanence is the only law the universe has ever kept. And while that truth aches, it also frees us. Because what matters is not how long something lasts, but how deeply it is felt in the brief time it is ours.